Color Commentary - Spencer Finch

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.

Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

Spencer Finch hardly looks up as I step into his unusually tidy studio. Bent over, dabbing paint onto what seems to be a large polka-dot drawing, he blurts out a casual "Hi" as he circles his cinemascope-shaped work like a chess master scrutinizing the position of his opponent. A minute later he finally straightens up and looks at me. "You see this color here? It's the color of that chair," Finch says, pointing to a rust orange piece of furniture sitting across the studio. When I approach the work, I see that the name of something nearby has been finely penciled in around the bottom of each circle: the World Trade Center (visible through the window); the word "real" written on apiece of paper; a T-shirt (now dust rag); a book on Ad Reinhardt; wire cutters; yellowish Hellmann's mayo jar; ultramarine pigment. The polka dots, it turns out, are the colors of the objects in the room, each circle distinct, but together a quirky, even tongue-in-cheek panorama of the artist's studio.

Nowadays, this kind of puckish Conceptualism may not raise a lot of eyebrows, but it does say a lot about Finch's determination to stick to his own brand of droll inventiveness. Indeed, as Artist's Studio (Theory of Relativity), 2001, demonstrates, Finch has a penchant for always playful, often abstruse, and sometimes patently absurdist projects. It may also explain why he reminds one more of a stoic philosopher or a reclusive monk than the post-Warholian rock star much more familiar in the art world today. A drawing composed of nothing more than colors and the names of their sources in the artist's studio is closer to alchemy than to a brew of Pop-Minimalism. Take the wry Forty-Eight Views of Loch Ness, 1997, which presents forty-eight unassuming photographs of the famous lake arranged in a grid. By inviting its viewers to imagine the monster they clearly are not given to see, Finch all but calls the mythical beast into being. In the slightly morbid Sky over Cape Canaveral (Challenger) ... August 12, 1994, a homemade siting device offers a view of the actual location in the sky where the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Then there's the batty Blue, 1996-2001, in which Finch beamed a one-second brain wave he recorded while watching the '70s television series Hawaii Five-O to Rigel, the bluest star in the sky, located 960 light-years from Earth. Transmitted in the form of a microwave capable of escaping Earth's ionosphere, the image should arrive in, oh, about 955 years.

As these works intimate, Finch, a thirty-eight-year-old Brooklyn-based artist, has a passion for the quixotic gesture and the well-honed litotes. This is evinced by his continued devotion to elaborate high-wire acts of drawing, a medium he has made central to his practice. In "Up," his most recent solo exhibition in New York, at Postmasters Gallery, drawings made up close to half the works on display. The most intellectually exhilarating of these was Index of Wind, 2000, a spectacularly hard-to-make-out white-on-white drawing, on which Finch has written the names of all the winds of the world, some 437 of them. I can't resist listing some here: Boreas, Zephyr, Xlokk, Argestes, names drawn from classical mythology lending these natural forces the guise of subjectivity and agency in much the same way hurricanes today are dubbed Agnes or Camille. The image of wind is captured not only by the near invisibility of the white pencil but also by the visual onomotopoeia of Finch's cursive handwriting, which is as del iberate as it is unstylized. Even the show's centerpiece, a motorized contraption suspended from the ceiling that dropped apples onto a square patch of Astroturf at five-minute intervals (Composition in Red and Green, 2000), was essentially a drawing. As the apples fall, they roll in random patterns onto the green carpet, referring obliquely to Newton's epiphany at the sight of the fruit falling from a tree, but for all intents and purposes creating a jury-rigged chaos-theory drawing.

While Composition in Red and Green may parlay the implicit tension between randomness and order into a conceptually elegant work, Finch's proclivity toward drawing is often governed less by an interest in physics than by a fascination with theories of color and the vagaries of our experience of it. Color provides Finch a way to get at tricky questions surrounding perception, memory, and consciousness. In the drawing Orange-Yellow (Sunset for Werner Heisenberg), 2000, for instance, Finch explores the phenomenology of color without the dogmatism of a systematic theory like that of Josef Albers or the direct visual experience offered by, say Ellsworth Kelly's shaped canvases. The drawing presents two circles: One is composed of the word "orange" scribbled in four different directions; the other is identical, only the word is "yellow." The pencil color is halfway between orange and yellow, and it is impossible to determine whether it is the former or the latter--or to delimit the color "yellow-orange" conceptual ly. Where precisely does orange end and yellow begin?