august

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the hills,
And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!

Armed with a colorimeter, Spencer Finch recorded the quality of color and light in Emily Dickinson’s garden on August 28, 2004. Using this data, he built a cloud out of crumpled plastic and a light panel that recreates the color and light he recorded. The piece, currently on display at the Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is called “Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).” (See this New York Times article for a good picture of the work.)

Another interesting, and certainly tangentially related, installation a representation of the breeze that blew off Walden Pond one March afternoon in 2007. It’s achieved with an array of fans mounted in columns and controlled by a computer, switching them off and on to reproduce the speed and direction of that wind from the past.

Finch plays with light and color, and occasionally other senses, to reproduce pieces of memory. Some of his pieces, like “Eos” and the Dickinson cloud, toy with literature and history; others are more mundane: they recreate the light in a hotel room, for example, or the color of the sky over Coney Island. They are playful and strange in their mix of exact measurement and poetics; Ken Johnson captures the sense of these pieces well in his Boston Globe review:

It helps to imagine Finch as a kind of nutty scientist played by Christopher Lloyd trying to distill and exactly measure the essence of poetry.

What is one to make of Finch’s projects? I’m certainly no art critic, so my opinion comes completely uninformed. But what strikes me as interesting about it is how radically decontextualized it is. Homer describes the “rosy-fingered dawn” above Troy, and Finch reproduces the exact spectrum of colors that comprise those rosy fingers with flourescent tubes. Has he distilled the essence of Homer’s poetry, or has he made even more clear how incredibly contingent poetry, and memory, and experience, really are?

I’m sometimes disappointed by the photographs that I bring back from an event; they’re so often flat and inexpressive, at least compared to the experience that they were meant to record. No camera is able to record the complex web of sensation, emotion, and memory that comprise an experience: the film may accurately record the spectrum of reflected light that fell on it while the shutter was open, but it cannot record the sounds and smells and tastes and feelings and fears and joys. The mind may record some of it, and a poet’s words might be able to communicate parts of it, but there is always that essential part that is somehow inexpressible. Finch expresses the expressible in minute detail, leaving us to grasp for what is left out.

See more fascinating Finch pieces at his web site, Spencer Finch (.com).