Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

Too Much Information
By Beth E. Wilson

In this age of Total Information Awareness, the World Wide Web, and the steadily increasing transformation of our very selves into digital identities, mountains of binary information are created every day. It’s gotten to the point that there are computer consultants who specialize in something called “data mining”

that is, sifting through all of it to find the particular records and/or patterns that will make all that information useful for particular purposes.
While we’re used to thinking about this now in terms of digital information, there’s a related phenomenon that takes place in the realm of art. It’s perhaps easiest to see in the relationship between painting and photography, and is amply demonstrated in a pair of exhibitions now on view at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz.

What’s the essential difference between a painter and a photographer? Both create two-dimensional images based on the three-dimensional world. (I am exempting painters who’ve abandoned representation altogether here.) Both tend to compose their images carefully, paying close attention to things like balancing the masses within the work, playing with or staying within the edges of the frame, thinking carefully about texture, color, etc.

All of these qualities are certainly present in the paintings of Milton Avery, an American artist who came to prominence in the mid-20th century. His work is the focus of an exhibition of works drawn from the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art that is now at the Dorsky. With his evocative use of simplified planes of color and a playful sense of positive and negative space, Avery depicts mostly simple, everyday scenes—a group of friends lounging about, birds, landscapes, and the like. There is a quiet, sometimes quite lyrical air about these paintings, which feature saturated colors scraped down close to the surface of the canvas, giving them a lightness that makes them almost seem ready to float off the wall.

The basic process Avery used seems to begin with the process of simplification—but I would contend that we might better think of it as a refusal to add too much detail. The most fundamental tools available to painters are things like line, color, and shape. Artists from the Renaissance well on through the 19th century who painted illusionistic canvases (intended to fool the viewer into believing the 3-D reality of what was painted) used exactly the same tools, only with a much more elaborate level of detail. No painting, regardless of how “lifelike” it appears, ever records everything present in a scene—artists are constantly editing down as they paint or sketch, paying more attention to a portrait sitter’s face, for example, than to the background or the clothing. The stroke of the paintbrush can only ever be a mediated representation, a judicious summary, of what was “actually” there in front of the artist.

What modernist painters accomplished, from the Impressionists on, was to refuse to lay on all that detail—to stop while the fundamentally abstract character of representation was still apparent to the viewer. Think of it as a resolution to stop lying—to stop trying to “trick” the viewer into believing the complexities of illusionistic painting as the truth, and instead to expose the real presence of the painting—and its most basic means of manufacture—the application of pigment on a flat surface.

Photography, on the other hand, presents an entirely different set of issues. The job of the photographer is not to painstakingly build up a believable world—the snap of the shutter passively records the full panoply of stuff out there, as the film records the light rays focused on it in either the microscopically fine grains of silver salts, or more recently the finely detailed grid of pixels preserved in a digital camera’s memory. From the moment of the medium’s invention, first publicly announced in 1839, people were astonished at the exacting level of detail recorded by the photographic image.
The photographer’s challenge, then, is essentially to frame and select his or her shot in such a way as to exclude information, to contain it within an aesthetic, despite the fact that the lens is voraciously drinking in every bit of information that it can. While abstraction seems (perhaps mistakenly so) to be the easiest thing to do in painting, for the photographer it is perhaps the hardest.

This fundamental issue has been explored a number of times over the years by James Welling, whose recent body of “Agricultural Works” is the focus of a second exhibition at the Dorsky, fortuitously paired with the Avery show. Welling has always taken something of an abstracted approach to his material (often with a good measure of wit), and the enormous series of color photographs in the Dorsky exhibition continue his structural investigations. Here he explores farms and agricultural activity in and near the Hudson Valley, emphasizing simple forms like repeated window casements in a milking barn, or the double helix of a large tractor-powered auger. But given the subject matter, it is impossible to present a totally pristine vision—there are always weeds sprouting, bits of hay stuck to an implement, bird droppings on the window ledge—reminders of both photography’s absolute inclusiveness and nature’s irrepressible fullness. Through this series of photographs, man’s domestication of plants and animals, and the attempt to control and structure nature, seems at best tentative, and at worst comically mismatched.

One of the best paintings in the Avery show is titled Waterfall. Here he has created a landscape of sharply contrasting color and contour, as we see an inky black field—the smooth, horizontal surface of a river—crash over a sharp edge to create stark, perpendicular white falls within an equally simplified, woodsy landscape. It is deceptively simple, and lyrically calls our attention to the powerful and complicated relationship between art and nature.

The economy of Avery’s technique came to mind as I looked at Welling’s Barn Exterior, Tullmeadow Farms, West Simsbury, CT. The photograph is dominated by the cropped, flat side of an old red barn, the weathered, stripped down paint reminding me of the scraped surfaces of Avery’s paintings—but here, the process documented is not the product of man’s hand, and the infinity of detail in each little paint fleck and raised grain of the wood testifies to photography’s absolute unblinking stare, contained momentarily but not entirely tamed by Welling’s framing eye.
Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

> milton avery Paintings from the Neuberger Museum of Art
through May 30 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, suny New Paltz, 75 S. Manheim Boulevard, New Paltz, NY. (845) 257-3844, or visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum.

> james welling agricultural works
through April 8, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, suny New Paltz, 75 S. Manheim Boulevard, New Paltz, NY. (845) 257-3844, or visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum.