For the past 15 years Warren Neidich has used a variety of artistic means to explore the developmental and cultural foundations of perception, consciousness and the mind. The gallery presented three projects which utilized three different approaches: painting, installation and sculpture, to investigate the experiential variability of color perception.”Rainbow Brushes”, 2007-08, consists of a series of thirteen and fifteen-inch paintbrushes that have been made through an action the artist refers to as “Performative Pulls”. The colors found in a section of a rainbow that appears in an already existing painting in the history of European Art are first matched on paper with acrylic paint. For instance, the work entitled “After Peter Paul Rubens, 1636” was made from the rainbow found in Ruben’s painting “Rainbow Landscape”, 1636-1638. The paper is laid flat on the ground and a brush is pulled through it, leaving its traces or afterimage on the bristles. The brush is then hung on the wall. According to the science of optics, a rainbow is a physical phenomenon made up of seven colors arranged in a specific order. However, painted rainbows from different periods in art history appear quite different as they express the varying cultural and experiential circumstances under which they were created. These same changing conditions are reflected in the construction of the mind of the artist. Therefore, the representation of each rainbow is the result of the projection of this mind upon the canvas, which acts as a screen illuminated by that particular condition of the mind. The installation of these brushes highlighted these differences and expressed the history and cumulative affects of cultural history on the mind as represented through the optics of art history.
Neidich’s close relationship to Los Angeles and his interest in the works of the California Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Maria Nordman served as the inspiration for the large sculpture installed in the front of the gallery. “Infinite Regress”, 2008, is a three-sided pavilion, each side consisting of a 3 x 2,8 m steel frame upon which ready-made automatic transparent glass sliding doors, like those found at airports and department stores, have been attached. Each door is tinted in one of the primary colors red, blue and yellow. The doors’ opening and closing was activated through the passing motion of visitors in the gallery whose presence stimulated an invisible eye in this case an infrared sensor. Visitors as actors were also encouraged to move into and through it. Their actions and secret relations with the “work itself” endlessly EXCITED the superimposition of the transparent colored door surfaces upon each other, producing the secondary mixtures of violet, green, and orange. As a social conduit, the pavilion was embedded in the tectonics of the gallery, situating itself at the juncture of its three adjoining spaces. This relational and performative work was primarily the result of random gestures and circulatory patterns of the visitors inhabiting the gallery. Yet there was always the possibility that these same visitors might form temporary alliances with each other to create a variety of emergent colored effects and affects.
“Red, White and Blue”, 2000-2008, was an installation shown in the back room of the gallery, made up of three one-meter square neon paintings and a wall of mirrors reflecting them. In “False Start”, 1959, Jasper Johns painted words in colors different from the colors named. Orange is painted in white and red is in blue. The object nature of the words is enhanced, rendering them almost unintelligible. The first part of “Red, White, Blue” consists of three painted canvases on which neon words spelling out the three colors of the American flag are attached but here, too, the colors are not consistent with their names. The neon for red consists of white letters and that of blue appears in red letters. This lack of correspondence is also found in a psychological test for attention called the Stroop Test, which takes advantage of our ability to read words more quickly and automatically than we can name colors. It measures a cognitive mechanism called directed attention. A poorer performance is found in individuals with attention deficit disorder but degrees of difficulty are also uncovered in normal people. The chromatic experiments using colored squares in the paintings of Joseph Albers, for instance “Homage to the Square”, 1965 are well known. But can experimental art works such as these go beyond the psychological and physiological conditions they stimulate? Surely they are imbedded in a history of art to which they communicate, but can they have biopolitical import. “Red, White and Blue”, 2000-2008 attempts to answer this question by engaging the body in a political way and drawing awareness to the way attention can be manipulated and information made confounding.
Warren Neidich has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide and his work is represented in private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum in Los Angeles and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. In the past his work has been shown internationally in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City; P.S.1, MOMA, Long Island City, Ludwig Museum, Cologne; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Kunsthaus Graz, Kunsthaus Zurich, and ICA London. A collection of his writing “Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain” was published by DAP in 2003. He is the recipient of the AHRB-ACE Art Award, 2004, The Arts Council of England Merit Award, 2005 and The British Academy Award, 2005. From 2008 to 2008, he was Visiting Artist and Research Fellow at the Center for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College, London.