Events

COLOR PHANTOMS (1971-2009)

Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing

Slides and video: Mary Lucier (1971-2015)
Sound: Robert Ashley, Automatic Writing (1979)

At the Kitchen: January 7 through February,2016.

Background:
Originally created as part of my ongoing experiments with motion and light on color slide film in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, Color Phantoms was first used as intimate overhead projection in an environment designed by me and Canadian composer Richard Martin. The environment was a closed, coffin-like box intended for one participant at a time lying flat on his or her back. The immediate effect of being shut into the enclosure was that of total sensory deprivation. As the slides were projected via an external mirror onto a screen very close to the viewer’s face, a tape of the composer’s electronic score was also played inside the box through headphones.  The closeness of the images and sound created additional physical and psychological discomfort. The slide projections, which are dark, layered, and often indistinct, only enhanced the sensations of claustrophobia and anxiety.  Each projected image originally consisted of two slides “sandwiched” together to create a blend of layers—landscapes captured in motion and off-screen black and white television images. The final composite slides are a mix of the two subjects, rotated and superimposed. Although they appear to be entirely still, they are in fact always in the process of dissolving one into the other.  That is the only movement.

When I was asked to revisit this work in 2009, I sought to create a situation that uses the device of the recumbent viewer, with its suggestion of psychoanalytic voyeurism, in a semi-public space without the “scary” enclosure of the box, and to add a sound component more compatible with the visual quality of my layered imagery. My dear friend, the composer Robert Ashley, agreed to collaborate with his 1979 work, Automatic Writing, which by itself creates a mysterious, almost hallucinatory sound environment. The two works together create an intense situation of close listening and viewing. 

The installation has been fleshed out according to a "template" of Dr. Freud's analytic couch and office, with artifacts placed throughout the space—books, photographs, and other works of art which, along with the music and video, serve as clues to a broader frame of reference within the world of the occult.

—Mary Lucier, December 20, 2015

Part of “From Minimalism into Algorithm.” This yearlong series sets contemporary and historical painting, sculpture, performance, and musical composition in counterpoint, proposing a new through-line for art-making during the past half century. Taking on the legacy of
Minimalist art and composition during the 1960s and 1970s—whose seriality was understood by artists and critics to correlate with the era’s industrial production and increased weight placed on the presence of the individual—as a precedent for reconsidering work by a younger generation, the program considers how serial repetition (and the privileging of experience) might now correspond more directly with digital technology and the reconfiguring of our encounters with physical space through networked communication.

For More Information:

Performing Artservices, Inc.
Mimi Johnson
260 West Broadway
New York, NY 10013
tel: 212/941-8911
fax: 212/334-5149
artservicesinc@mindspring.com