Too Much Information

by Beth E. Wilson, March 11, 2009

 

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.