Everyday, we have an opportunity to remember that we have minds. We have eyes and ears and senses of smell and touch. We should be ever skeptical of any ready-made, omnipresent narrative of reality. We have the physical ability to relate with the world directly. As such, we bear the responsibility of looking at that world, at ourselves, at each other, and grappling with all the difficulty, pain, and confusion that comes along with that looking. Otherwise, how will we ever conceive of any version of reality other than the present one?

The research behind my work is focused primarily on the Light and Space Movement and Minimalism, particularly the art and writings of Donald Judd and Robert Irwin. Through their work, I was introduced to the phenomenological in art. It’s about our physical sensory awareness and how cultural hierarchical systems of value inhibit that awareness. If something isn’t culturally significant, although our eye perceives it, it won’t register in our minds. We literally won’t see it. This begs the question, “How much am I not seeing?” And, not just visually. How much of my conception of reality is based on pre-conceived ideological structures? I think about how Neoliberalist economics reduce everything, including, possibly, even our most intimate relationships with others and ourselves, to transactional, productivity-obsessed bottom lines. How it conflates the power of consumer choice with the power of personal and political freedom. The phenomenological is a tool for dismantling such ideological blindness.

ROBERT IRWIN

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, by
Lawrence Weschler

“Is the moment of perception — that first moment, before all the abstracting, conceptualizing processes that follow — is that moment closest or furthest from the real? Everything depends on your answer to that question.”

“We’re talking about a mental construct to which the whole civilization has deeply committed itself. And what it says, simply, is that as I walk through the world, I bring into focus certain things which are meaningful, and others are by degrees less in focus, dependent upon their meaningfulness in terms of what I’m doing, to the point where there are certain things that are totally out of focus and invisible. We organize our minds in terms of this hierarchical value structure, based on certain ideas about meaning and purpose and function. And perhaps more than anything else, modernist art as a movement has arisen as a critique of that hierarchical structure. When art begins the process of taking all the pictorial out of the pictorial, taking all the symbolic meaning out of the mark and the line, what it’s really doing, essentially, is flattening that value structure.”

“[Modernism has] been a long, arcing dissent from the dominant abstract systematization, the technological qualification that has so characterized the rest of human experience during the past two centuries. Technology is wonderful, the improvements it has brought are fantastic. But the modernist trajectory over the past two hundred years has been about everything that progress has been leaving out. Quality as opposed to quantity. Quality, which can only be experienced by each unique individual, phenomenologically, across the passage of lived time.”

Notes Toward a Conditional Art,“The Art of Pure Inquiry”  

DAVID RASKIN

Donald Judd

“Rather than showing us what the world is like, credible art complicates the present.”

ADRIAN KOHN

Heightened Perception:
Donald Judd, John
Chamberlain, Robert
Irwin, and Larry Bell,
1960–1975

“A prominent similarity becomes clear amid the perceptual experiments of Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and several other artists in the 1960s and 1970s. These painters and sculptors made works that bring about new visual phenomena and that demand a specialized mode of vision, a way of seeing that trades the utility and efficiency of everyday sight for a hypersensitive focus upon what is unusual and barely discernible. The payoff for the extreme amounts of time and effort required to observe artworks in this manner constitutes common ground as well. By engaging their paintings, objects, and spaces, one can gather new knowledge.”


“Most works are best understood visually and not verbally, of course, and the translation into language of thoughts inextricably tied to material, space, and phenomena presents additional difficulties.”


“The failure of language seems to coincide with the discovery of unprecedented phenomena and of the impending limits to one’s present perceptual capacity. Probing this threshold remains a promising way both to encounter fresh sensations and to continue heightening one’s sensitivity to even subtler phenomena.”

“Sensations for which we have no good name begin to register when one takes a little time to look more closely than usual.”

“Often, with [Irwin’s] art, the phenomena one perceives ultimately defy direct description.”

“The dot and disc paintings refine acuity across the board, eliciting unaccustomed examination of sights thought already familiar, first glimpses of phenomena heretofore subliminal, and newfound sensitivity—albeit unconscious—to stimuli altogether imperceptible before.”


“Experiencing these sensations, and re-learning how things look and how they are, amounts to new knowledge about a world that can sometimes seem exceedingly familiar when we cannot take the time to scrutinize it.”

“By perceiving phenomena so unlike what we normally apprehend, we learn about the novel sensations themselves but also discover the existence of vast amounts of sensory data that go unremarked in art objects and in the world at large.”