Artist pursues ‘sight’ in public art

Apparently Homer liked coining his share of pithy phrases: every morning (there were 20 of them in “The Odyssey” alone) is a “rosy-fingered Dawn.” What exactly that means is left to the reader’s interpretation. Enter Spencer Finch, the artist who gave this year’s Committee on the Arts in Public Places lecture on April 1.

“I know it sounds totally corny, but I had this weird compulsion to see what Achilles saw,” Finch told his audience. “I had a lot of bad ideas over the course of five to six years — most of them involved shields — then it occurred to me that the sky hasn’t changed.”

What followed was an odyssey of his own to the exact place in the Aegean where Troy is reputed to have stood. Using a colorimeter — for the not so knowledgeable, that’s a device that measures wavelengths of light — Finch was able to preserve the exact shade of dawn the characters of Homer’s tales would have encountered. Their eyes had seen, and now visitors to his shows and galleries would see too.

“What you see is what you see, according to a dictum of art, 1960s style,” Middlebury College Museum of Art Chief Curator Emmie Donadio said as she introduced him at the lecture. “What it means, or what it feels — these are what he pursues.”

In short, Finch’s art is a pursuit of sight, in the purest manifestations of the term. He shared some of his results in a series of slides, most of them not quite what they seemed, and many poking and probing at basic philosophical questions.

A group of oval canvases, various shades of grey, turned out to be a glimpse at what Freud’s patients must have seen as they were psychoanalyzed in a Vienna study. Dozens of swatches, in myriad shades of pink, made up an exhibit titled “Trying to remember the color of Jackie Kennedy’s pill-box hat.” You know the one. Yet another combines Vladimir Nabokov’s ideas about a color assigned to each letter of the alphabet in his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” with a meditation on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

“It sounds pretty pretentious,” Finch said. “If anyone else tried it, I’d be appalled. Heisenberg describes relativity. When you observe something, you change it. The concept fascinates me.”

Finch changed 9,251 characters of Heisenberg’s text, transliterating them according to Nabokov’s colored alphabet. His product is a vast wall of multi-colored dots.

His exploration of color and light has not remained static. A recent work capturing Thoreau’s Walden Pond with bits of Monet’s many studies of water is rendered more interesting by the fact that the artist was known to butt heads with French impressionism in graduate school.

“I always thought Monet was sort of saccharine and boring,” he said. “My friends dared me to try copying one of his works, if it was so easy. I painted under protest. I wanted to criticize, but I ended up falling in love. As a kind of homage I traveled to Rouen to paint the famous cathedrals, but when I got there the whole thing was covered in scaffolding.”

There doesn’t seem to be a working definition of public art, other than that it is in some way (surprise, surprise) public. For one project, Finch spent 700 minutes on a tugboat taking 700 pictures of the Hudson River. He took pixels from these photos and converted the colors into glass panes, which were placed in windows along New York City’s High Line, a park built along a section of old elevated railway tracks. Taken together, the windows record the metamorphosis of the Hudson over the course of one day.

A pending project features public art on a massive scale, as Finch collaborates with the Johns Hopkins Hospital to install entire walls of colored glass on the building’s exterior.

Like many other modern artists, Finch struggles to determine just how much context should be given to his work.

“It’s something that has bedeviled me for years,” he said. “I’d love it if people could approach my pieces as abstractions first, then have chips delivered to their brains telling them it is actually something else later. I do think pieces should be strong enough to stand up for themselves.”

He is sure a current project will be met with confusion. Finch is flooding one floor of a French gallery and building a bridge that will move visitors along the different phases of the moon. Minimalist in style, it seems self-explanatory — bridge, stars, watery depths — but each detail has been obsessed over. The height of each bridge post has been considered; when all posts are even the exhibit seems flat, but when they are all uneven it seems cartoonish.

At any rate, he is excited.

“I know it may not be too popular,” Finch said. “I love it — am I allowed to say that?”

The same could be said for each work detailed in the lecture.