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REVIEW: 'By Accident and Necessity'
We take reality for granted.
We open our eyes, and the world unfurls before us like a widescreen movie. Or so it seems.
In truth, our minds would crash like a TRS-80 taking on a terabyte if we were to consciously absorb everything around us.
Our seemingly seamless experience of the world is actually filled in by our brains, which employ algorithms, extrapolate and recruit memory.
What falls outside of our perceptual spotlight, the distinction between what is and what seems to be, is the subject of Tom Bamberger’s newest work, which he calls photographs with time or videos without time.
The immersive and sensuous scenes, projected onto three mammoth screens, were the centerpiece of a collaborative installation event last weekend that also featured Wild Space Dance Company, directed by Debra Loewen, and a sound installation by Rob Danielson.
Watched carefully, Bamberger’s images changed, dramatically at times, in ways that our minds could not detect, a phenomena known as “change blindness.”
What seemed like a still photograph of shallow water, for instance, grew murkier, deeper, more translucent, more supple, more reflective, in turns.
Yellow leaves appeared where there were none. A curving bend of water dissipated. A striation of rock emerged in its place. Real things slipped into line and form, into abstraction, and back again.
Like nature itself, and our experience of it, there was an imperceptible flowering and decay of surface and shape, depth and distance. And I could not take my eyes off of it.
The trio of screens commanded a surprising level of contemplation, like a Renaissance triptych created for religious veneration. This was not only because of the unseen transformations but because of the sheer beauty of it and the strange alterations in the mind.
The illuminated screens had a powerful material presence, aggrandized versions of the computer and television screens that command so much of our attention today.
There is, of course, an irony in being seduced by them. Unlike our TVs and computers, these screens cannot be watched in the same way. There was something familiar about that relationship of screen, looking and being tuned out. But, in a culture that’s fixated on what happens next – the latest tidbit of breaking news or the next episode of “Lost” – I found it strange to be captivated by something so devoid of narrative, action and change.
I am reminded of Plato’s admonition to “practice dying,” to let go of our attachments to experience and the phenomenological world. The brain’s tendency to follow, to keep track, to categorize and to tuck things away in their proper place was frustrated by the work. Our desire to understand was too.
To relinquish control, to untether one’s conscious awareness, was, as can be the case with jazz or experimental music, the only real way to have the experience. In fact, distraction was a tool for seeing. If you looked away, got caught up in a conversation or the dance and sound, and then looked back, the change was more apparent.
This is why the integration of the dance and sound installation, which included music by Morton Feldman, contributed so much to the project.
In one section of the three-hour event, reeds of brown grass surfaced softly from blank white panes and replicated before our eyes. These natural and airy images became thick, dense and disturbingly manmade.
There was a dissonant ringing and a popping sound that could have been bark breaking or the crackling of fire. It had the sound of dryness. But as the ears focused their attention and got their spatial bearings, it became clear that the sound was water. The hard snapping pops were the sound made by drops hitting a certain kind of surface. And soon, without realizing it, you could anticipate the next pop. Like the reeds, the sounds were layering up upon themselves.
The Wild Space dancers, who first appeared in our peripheral vision, in the far corners of the large warehouse space where the event took place, seemed to embody the slippery nature of vision itself, slithering forward, emerging, falling away, in a constant state of change.
They seemed to embody the nature of attention, too, with some movement defined by active looking and reacting, while others were more unknowing and even mechanical. I loved the George Rhoads-like, audio-kinetic sounds that drove the dancers to turn, clutch and release, like the gears of a clock.
Throughout the piece, this tug and pull between the natural and human made, between the intuitive and the machine-like persisted.
Art, by definition, is about short-circuiting our assumptions and revealing new ways of seeing, and Bamberger, Loewen and Danielson seemed to do this in a direct way by teasing out our cognitive tendencies and patterns.
The result of surrendering to it was something oddly expansive and dynamic for such an outwardly minimalist and “unchanging” piece.
I had an experience, I think, of how finite and rare – if powerful – human attention is. I was left with an awe for the intricacy and breadth of the mind, the eye and the world itself.
I don't remember the last time I wrote about an art show that had ended, that the readers of my column couldn't go see, but I am making an exception because it was a rare event, not the level of work I’m used to seeing in Milwaukee.
It’s not perfect. There were times when Wild Space was informal to the point of being imprecise, for instance, when it seemed like precision might be called for, particularly in a refined project like this one.
Also, when I read previews of the event, several people described watching Bamberger’s videos in his studio. In each case there was the moment when he snapped the video back to its start in order to reveal the surprise, all of the change that had happened.
Allowing the sequences of imagery to cycle through the three screens at slightly varying paces invited visual comparisons. This, in turn, allowed the nature of the work, the fundamental invisibility of it, to reveal itself progressively rather than in a single surprise.
This seems like a critical step forward for a body of work that is still clearly in the state of becoming. It’s a natural progression, too, from Bamberger’s earlier photography, which inserted itself between our senses and consciousness in interesting ways as well.
I will be very interested to see where Bamberger's video work goes now that it's had this breakthrough, and I can think of few subjects as relevant today as that of human attention and its limitations.
"By Accident and Necessity" took place on Jan. 29 and 30 in a warehouse in Walker's Point. Bamberger is a nationally known photographer and the former curator of photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum. He is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York.
Images are courtesy of Tom Bamberger (top image) and Wild Space Dance Company.