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The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

In connection with this subject of mysterious disappearance of which everymemory is stored with abundant example it is pertinent to note the belief of Dr. Hem,of LeipzigThis distinguished scientist has attracted some attention, particularly,says one writer, among the followers of Hegel, and mathematicians who hold to theactual existence of a so called non-Euclidian space that is to say, of space which hasmore dimensions than length, breadth and thickness space in which it would bepossible to tie a knot in an endless cord and to turn a rubber ball inside out without asolution of its continuity, in other words, without breaking or cracking it.Dr. Hem believes that in the visible world there are void places vacua and somethingmore holes, as it were, through which animate and inanimate objects may fall intothe invisible world and be seen or heard no more. The theory is something like this:Space is pervaded by luminiferous ether, which is a material thing as much asubstance as air or water, though almost infinitely more attenuated. All force, all formsof energy must be propagated in this; every process must take place in it which takesplace at all. But let us suppose that cavities exist in this otherwise universal medium,as caverns [within] the earth, or cells in a Swiss cheese

Ambrose Gwinnett BierceFrom Science to the Front found within

Present at a Hanging and OtherGhost Stories

The above passage, written by late 19th century satirist and fictionauthor Ambrose Bierce, is composed as a rational, yet fictionalargument for a series of preceding ghost tales. This concluding segmentexists as a speculative foil for the emotional resonance of supernaturaldisappearances. The passage opens up two roads for the reader - onebeing a suspension of belief in the supernatural, the other a suspensionof disbelief in the scientific. Both capture the idea that there must be aparallel reasoned, albeit inadequate, argument for the realm of theinvisible.

In the work of Amy Beecher and Susan Bricker, we are presented withvisual criteria establishing both presence and absence in the materialand in the immaterial. In both of the artists work, there is amanipulation of paint, yet there exists an elusive and supernaturalcomponent to the work that suggests a tenuous relationship with thetraditional or fundamentalist modes of abstraction and representation.

In Susan Brickers studio, the artist made mention of her appreciation ofthe work of Henri Mattise, which makes for a compelling alignment inpractical similarities with regard to the production of space within thepicture plane. Mattises use of the brush stroke, which occasionallywould act as a representative object, reinforced the tactility of the paintand created a rift in the suspension of illusion within the picture. InBrickers case paint itself constitutes forms, allowing for infinite potential

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for the accelerated self-referential quality of the paint. Mattise and thePost-Impressionists played an important part (along with photo-mechanical reproduction) in liberating painting from the relativelyrestricting confines of representing reality at a one to one ratio. Byopening up paintings potential, the technical aspects of painting,

brushstrokes, color, content, became less subservient to the lens ofreality and more capable of approximating the supernatural.

In Susans work we find objects, totems and devotional itemsconstructed of paint and slipping in and out of recognition. There is aviscosity ratio within the production and creation of these objects thatallows for slippage, both literally and figuratively speaking. Thisresonates within the content by the simulation of decay, erosion andother principles of loss including time. In one picture, an ice cream cone

wrapper vacillates between painterly abstraction and sticky-sweetrepresentation, the paint acts much like melted chocolate and ice creamsmearing and staining, a gooey ghost of a day-dream treat. We seeall of these objects in the absence of a figure. One may read the work asmelancholic, denoting the heartache and after burn of an emptied outgathering perhaps the absence of a human presence is meant to exaltthe potency of finding the poetic in the everyday. Another may read thisas a strategy towards delineation and inclusion, allowing for the viewerto populate the scene. Regardless of the perceived disappearance offigures within the space, we are privy to a variation of views in eachscene, birds-eye, in-perspective, flattened space, each seeming to

increase the abject possibilities of figure/ground relationships. Bycreating a sensation of distortion, these views act as a painterlyequivalent of mise en scene, heightening the privation of the view whilstaugmenting the quirk of the abject voyeurism. There is a pervasivesense of the paranormal and the animate in the work that leaves onewith a feeling of sinister qualities.

In Amy Beechers work we also see the viscosity of paint acting as afigure at once frozen and crystallized, yet also captured in a state ofpossible transition. The document both accumulates and losesinformation as it passes through several modes of technological re-

interpretation, ultimately sputtering out as ink from a printer toconstitute a final frozen image, the result of both accumulation and loss.The work speaks to both the limitations and the possibilities ofcontemporary imaging, capturing information that is just as in flux asthe technology supporting its production. One might hark back to thework of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the inventiveness of the early Bauhauspractitioners who made it their mission to reject paint and focus on thetechno-scientific possibilities that allowed for new ways of both

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capturing and seeing light. In Ms. Beechers work there is a temporalitythat does not seem as much revolutionary as it is peremptory, theresulting image becomes just as slippery as the fictional passage at thebeginning of this essay; offering scientific reason for mysteriousdisappearances, here we have a mysterious appearance instead. An

image that slips both into the (digital) void and back again, gaining auralectoplasm as it returns back into the realm of the visible. Moholy-Nagymade reference to a third kind of space, one that was multidimensional(perhaps non-Euclidian) that was created when producing hisphotograms. This space/image exists in the invisible realm, both out oftime and liminal space, only to enter our world through the technologythat birthed the image. The technology and the image, both inextricablylinked through necessity, like some spectre that has been banished fromour reality, yet still haunts us beyond the technological void.

The difficulty of crossing a field here can be recognized as difficulty in

transportation via imagery, something like traveling without moving.The field in this sense is that of a force, supernatural andphenomenological, an aesthetic force field. With these two artists wefind that the threshold (the ether) is the medium itself, paint. Themodality is constituted by arrival and departure, absence and presence.These binary and polemical states actualize, bring forth and conflateboth the abstract and the paranormal in both of these artists work.Ultimately we are left with pictures of vacua, both literalized andallegorical. These views, scenes and objects are captured in flux andfrozen, haunting us as so many successful pictures often do.

This brings us to the conclusion, for the moment, where I should statethat this essay exists as the analogous equivalent to the explanatoryparagraph written by Ambrose Bierce, the author himself havingmysteriously disappeared around December 1914, just about a yearbefore Kazimir Malevich filled the void with his Black Square. For what itis worth, the passage from Science to the Front concludes with thefollowing sentiments:

Baldly and imperfectly as here stated, Dr. Hems theory, in so far as it professes to bean adequate explanation of mysterious disappearances, is open to many obviousobjections; to fewer as he states it himself in the spacious volubility of his book. Buteven as expounded by its author it does not explain, and in truth is incompatible with

some incidents of, the occurrences related in these memoranda It is not my duty toindue facts and theories with affinity.

And so it goes that perhaps reasoned argument will not suffice Thesepictures require your presence! If all things are in flux, then let uscelebrate the work of Amy Beecher and Susan Bricker for snapping theirviews into our reality!

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Jeffrey Scott MathewsXXTDCF 2011