| James Harris: Singing the Body Electric Illuminations:
It would be a mistake to consider these as images created only for instant consumption—they present a panorama of temporality in the synoptic revelation of light, color and shape; they depict tension and resolution in formal choices rendered onscreen while deploying a full range of painterly strategies. Ashley's relentless rectangular shapes—called to the service of color—jostle for primacy, get on top of one another, are symmetric at times, asymmetric at others, resolved today, ruptured tomorrow; some pictures are labyrinthine, others multi-dimensional; the most haunting invite a viewer to meditate on propositions of depth or movement aglow on the still surface of the screen. I find most compelling those pictures made of delicate, discrete rectangles, patterned across larger color fields toned to hues that mimic translucence—the Humming Bird and Three Edges sets are good examples. These formally austere medleys rise above the clichéd noise of saturated color working too hard for emotional approval—a frequent outcome in computer generated imagery. Look into the bounty of these pictures: a straight line fibrillates along the edge where two colors meet; a synonymous hue spreads across a paced gap of smooth, tepid space; a jumble of small box-shapes pulsates. The underlying formal strategies often appear effortless, or better, quietly inevitable; they rarely over-reach the artist's active eye, rarely fail to heed slow zones of light and color where the mind seems to pause and catch its breath (find inspiration?). The most successful creations in Ashley's work—and plenty exist to choose from—are saturated with an invitation to dwell in their amplitude, to enter an idealized space that seduces like raw reality. The pictures I frequently return to (in addition to the sets mentioned above, also see 18 Lohans, 11 Bodhis and Dasarâjadharma) stream into view free of the fantods and caprices of a computer image beholden to its aura of technological origin; these are seminal creations, not illustrative examples; given color, given light, given bounded space, they are phenomena not epiphenomena. On many occasions when returning to look at these pictures, I encounter musical elements that inform and suffuse them. It's difficult to choose a good way to explain this. For starters, consider how the existence of a musical score is analogous to the source code that defines and circumscribes, but does not enact, perform or present the "table drawings". If you've listened to an 18th Century keyboard piece, played on both harpsichord and piano (think of Keith Jarrett’s harpsichord and Glenn Gould’s piano performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations), you will have come across an antecedent to a 21st Century debate about computer-enabled imagery: where is the artist's intent when code-generated images based on one source display differently in different computing environments? But there's more. When Keats wrote, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter," he had been looking at the images on a Grecian urn, an "unravish’d bride of quietness" and the "silent" revelers depicted at a wedding. Something like Keats' experience—to hear, or imagine, music when looking at an image—is one reaction I have to Ashley's work. I've had similar experiences looking at the later paintings of Piet Mondrian—aware of something musical that is more formally fundamental and essential than simply the suggestive words in titles: Rhythm, Fox Trot and Boogie-Woogie. I also find musical elements in several of M.C. Escher's graphic sets: Sky & Water and Symmetry and Metamorphosis. Why these two Dutch artists, dissimilar as their work is, when other examples might be given? Because each of them—and Ashley—achieves, with minimal compositional elements, the effects I find musical. Furthermore, it's fair to say that some of Ashley's images echo, if distantly, Mondrian's rectangular grid and limited palette. And, Ashley can create the illusion of dimensionality and depth on a flat plane through the transformation of basic geometric shapes, as does M.C. Escher. In Ashley's practice, the ongoing daily presentation of each picture makes it available as part of a lineage that can approach visual melody through subtle color variation, or in a shape doppelgänger, and often both. This referential accretion within the sets—of color palettes and kindred abstract forms—creates a larger context for the individual images. These forward driving re-organizations and re-statements unify a thread (a kind of content free narrative excursion) that arcs through claimed time in a visual sequence of tones, crescendos and recapitulations. One trope of Ashley’s practice, invoked occasionally at the conclusion of a set of pictures—to re-present the whole group in a single concatenated image—makes readily available the fugal elements that migrate and turn up from one picture to the next in many of his sets. Daily improvisation drives the images through time. This is as true for these pictures as it is for the found melodies of jazz. In the liner notes to Miles Davis' album Kind of Blue, pianist Bill Evans compares jazz improvisation to the spontaneity demanded in Japanese zenga—lively brush-stroke painting. Evans remarks: "As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time." One of the fascinating things about the pictures being considered here is how their improvisations unfold, and remain visible, while incorporating a temporal dimension. The incongruent notion of temporality represented in stasis that these pictures embody—a sort of cousin to Keats' unheard melodies—carries with it an invitation to contemplation, meditation, and a rainbowed celebration of space and time. The source-coded way of making pictures electronically is still in an early stage of emergence, not yet fully fledged. Again, think of a musical analogy: for most of human history the auditory vibrations that create the sounds of music have been produced by physical acts of scraping, plucking, banging, shaking, blowing; recently, technologies that create sound electronically have opened new possibilities for instrumentation and musical exploration. Similarly, computer generated graphics extend the traditional, physically mediated, realm of images—paint, dye, canvass, silk, wood, ceramic, plaster, metal, and so forth—making possible the creation of light and color and pictures out of only electronic impulses. Whether these pictures are art, as opposed to decoration or doodling, depends not on how and where they are produced and reproduced, not on the use or absence of historical materials, not, in the end, on tradition or fixed ideas, but on the possibility and intensity of perceptual experience purchased by the made thing, purchase that enables imagination to restore a fragment of time to wonder through the spirit of a thing created. The last two lines of Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric are: O I say now these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but
of the soul, It seems to me the pictures Ashley's making are worth looking into. Meditations:
James
Harris |