THE clocks have gone back, the darkness is encroaching, some recent weather has been positively diabolical, but a clever bit of programming at Dundee Contemporary Arts means that all is not despair. The cure for SAD is at hand, thanks to a major
solo exhibition by the American artist Spencer Finch.
In a room lit by the chill white heat of 100 fluorescent tubes, the artist has suspended what seems like an improvised blue cloud crafted from gels, those translucent filters used in photography, clipped together with humble wooden clothes pegs.
The suspended sculpture is ludicrous, unconvincing, cartoonish, but none the less delightful. Twisting in the air currents of the room, the crumpled sheets of blue, violet and grey sparkle or fade. This work, Sunlight In An Empty Room, is an attempt to recreate a summer afternoon in a Massachusetts garden of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century American poet. The idea is, aptly, a melancholic one, the bright New England sunlight cast briefly into shadow as a cloud passes over the sun.
Finch is an artist who is hard to categorise. Some aspects of his work ally him to the sterner aspects of conceptualism, all ideas and numbers and rigid philosophical inquiry. In other ways his work is part of a long lineage of American art, where the legacy of the riotous colours and mysticism of abstract expressionism became secretly folded into the more sober codes of minimalism. It's possible also to see his work in the light of great art historical inquiry – Turner's experiments chasing turbulent weather and the mysteries of light and perception, Monet's dogged determination observing the effect of changing light on haystacks or the unyielding façade of Rouen Cathedral.
Underlying Finch's art is an investigation into the arcane scientific world of light measurement, colour and intensity. Sunlight In An Empty Room was created with the help of scientific instruments. But this work is set against the more human endeavour of art making: drawing, painting and sculpture.
There are two lit rooms, each apparently the same pale Prussian blue, one created with lights and gels, the other with paint and pigment. A complex sequence of panels, made from mixing and diluting blue pigments, 8456 Shades Of Blue (After Hume) seeks to explore the enlightenment philosopher's writings on perception and memory. But the most successful works are the showpiece sculptures. An elaborate constellation of lightbulbs is an attempt to recreate the night sky over Arizona, not by replicating the light quality but by building an incandescent model of the molecular structure of the pigment in question.
Sky (Over Franz Joseph Glacier, April 8 2008) emulates the blue sky over a New Zealand glacier as well as the closed system of freezing, melting and evaporation that takes place there. A suspended ice machine creates blue ice cubes that slide down a chute and melt into a pool the precise colour of the sky that Finch recorded. The water overflow is then pumped back into the ice machine in a never-ending loop.
Do these strategies work? As representation of complex optical and scientific effects they undoubtedly fail, but as investigations into the huge gap between our experiences and our memories, they are touching. Each work suggests that neither science nor art can match the real thing, but that somehow both endeavours are essential.
In a fine example of joined-up working, Glasgow's Common Guild is showing a selection of Finch's works on paper at the artist Douglas Gordon's Victorian town house on Woodlands Terrace. Here, the psychological and poetic aspects of Finch's work come alive. Three sludgy pastels record the changing light on the ceiling above Freud's couch in Vienna. A sequence of 11 gorgeous watercolours Peripheral Error (After Moritake) evoke a Japanese haiku wherein the poet mistakes a butterfly at the edge of his field of vision for a falling flower petal.
Best of all is the stairwell filled with the sequence of ink drawings, 102 Colours From My Dreams. Each is a coloured Rorschach blot, based on an attempt to recall, on waking, the colours that appeared in the artist's own dreams. It's a hopeless task, but an evocative one, moving between banal and sublime. A pinkish red is "meat in a supermarket package," an umber recalls the "freckles on a boyish shrink." The ungraspable nature of dreams, their vivid appearance and sudden disappearance, is recreated in a jolly rainbow of ink patterns.
Both shows suggest that failure is a kind of success, a bit like that Beckett aphorism about trying, failing, trying again and failing again better. Man-made objects and man-made systems are a poor substitute for nature. But there's something rather wonderful about the attempt, particularly viewed through the darkened lens of a gloomy Scottish autumn. v
DCA, until January 4, Common Guild, until November 29 www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/gravity-always-wins.html, www.thecommonguild.org.uk/events/13
