Q+A: Lucas Blalock vs. Corin Hewitt
This is the fourth installment in a conversation series initiated by Lucas Blalock with contemporary artists concerning materiality in regards to current photographic practice.
“Why is there no brown nor grey light?”
“A natural history of colors would have to report on their occurrence in nature, not on their essence. Its propositions would have to be temporal ones.”
“In everyday life we are virtually surrounded by impure colours. All the more remarkable that we have formed a concept of pure colours.”
…”internal properties” of a colour gradually occur to us, which we hadn’t thought of at the outset. And that can show us the course of a philosophical investigation…“
“Brown light”. Suppose someone were to suggest that a traffic light be brown.”
“Imagine we were told that a substance burns with a grey flame. You don’t know the colours of the flames of all substances: so why shouldn’t such a thing be possible?”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Remarks On Colour
Corin Hewitt is currently exhibiting The Grey Flame and The Brown Light until the end of August in his home state of Vermont. Like Hewitt’s other projects of recent years, he transforms the exhibition space into a studio in which he labors publicly to create objects and pictures that relate to an interconnected set of concerns including aesthetics, local history, and geology. In his current project Hewitt is working below a staged floor (that of a theater stage or gymnasium) amongst a collection of objects relating to Vermont’s “natural” environment. The project focuses on an investigation of the colors brown and gray as basic states with tremendous generative possibilities seen through their relation to the life cycle of the forest floor.
The Grey Flame and The Brown Light
LB: Can you give an introduction to your current project?
CH: I have made a color generating machine. The “machine” extracts the composted colors of browns and greys from the forest floor and generates vibrant colors using that material. I created a process where I use a group of flatbed scanners to scan the surfaces that I find in the rocks, ash, sand, soil, and decaying vegetal matter. I then use Photoshop to compress these scans into a single color. Using that single color, which is always somewhere in the brown or gray range, supersaturate it to make vibrant monochromes. These monochromes are printed on a digital pigment printer to create bright monochrome photographs. These photographs are finally “shed” into the piece only to slowly dissolve again into the soil. As the piece progresses the monochromes compost into the soil and then they become part of the material getting scanned. In many ways this “machine” is like a flowering plant. Or like the flowering plant in reverse, as it is the “dissolved” or “composted” states that have has the greatest potential instead of the flowers or vibrant monochromes.
The Grey Flame and The Brown Light
LB: I am curious about the role of the studio in your practice (which also functions here as a terrarium, laboratory, performance space, and optical device). I am interested in the way that the studio for you becomes a primary condition through which all of the resulting production can be viewed.
CH: I like to think of it in terms of figure and ground. The “ground” is the fertile history that is being both worked, struggled, and stewarded. The “figure” is studio where there is a more perceptible relationship in time between ideas, the maker, and the material.
The Grey Flame and The Brown Light
LB: Do you see this practice in terms of model making? In that the studio becomes a model for a greater set of relationships and actions in the world at large?
CH: If by model making you mean an example that needs to be imitated, I would say no. But if you mean a type of interaction that emphasizes the processes of formation, I would agree. As I have said before, I really value the verbs that go into making. The shaping as the shape. History as the tool that is used to shape the present as well as a form that action stands in relation to.
In this piece I am asserting the value of the hues of brown and gray. Examining how those are luminous colors. Colors full of the history of their formation. In the model of the color sphere they are closer to the center of the sphere as they are comprised of mixtures. Using rock, soil, leaf mulch, sand, and ash as materials in where those colors are evidenced in the ground. Thinking about how those materials contain specific and dense histories that are compressed making them perceptually difficult to engage. They are fertile materials I use as a way to think about scaling of firmament in time.
The Grey Flame and The Brown Light
LB: Once in the studio situation your practice works on the materials amassed in a way that lends itself to being seen as “at hand”. I am thinking of the way that the “studio as figure” brings basic relationships between you, your materials, and your tools into focus. For example, your use of the most basic natural materials (dirt, rock, ash), which have often been used allegorically, instead here feel grounded in their material relationship/particular usefulness in regards the dual life cycles of color and the forest. Can you talk a bit about this?
CH: It is the process that has use value. A process that rethinks material “loss”or “depletion”. The process forms a figure or a body that circulates material through it. Using that circulation to create new types of energy through color.
I would also agree that I don’t see them as allegorical if you are thinking of allegory as having a purely symbolic function. They are “useful” materials. The use value that I see in them here in this process. Like all things they contain history and I use a few tools to mine an investigate the current “tendencies” of that history. Their lean.
LB: Amongst the Wittgenstein quotes in the press release he writes; “A natural history of colors would have to report on their occurrence in nature, not on their essence. Its propositions would have to be temporal ones.” This speaks to this notion of usefulness or materiality for me. Did Wittgenstein’s writings on color act as an impetus for you?
CH: Well…I have been working with dirt as a material for many years. Growing up the colors of the browns of soil were important to us in our gardens as it told a lot about the fertility of the soil. I later starting using dirt as a sculptural material that I then cast in a variety of ways. Following this process of thought, I used worms and soil to compost photographs in my Seed Stage piece at the Whitney. I became really interested how the soil and the worms shifted the color values of those photographs towards the browns of the castings and soil. Also during the process of making Seed Stage, in an attempt to figure out how to deal with surface in the piece, I had collected a bunch of recycled paint. The colors of these paints were mostly unused seasonal colors from the last ten or so years. Designer paints including things such as Martha Stewart’s Spring Lavender 2003 or Calvin Klein’s Fall Mist 2006. I mixed all of these paints together to make greys that I could use to paint the stage and the worm bins. I liked the variety of greys that I could produce. I ended up choosing one for the surface of the stage which I then modulated from one end to a brown on the back side which covered the root cellar.
So…a long answer, but when I read Wittgenstein’s remarks on color last year I was struck by his similar preoccupation with browns and grays. He came to these colors through an attempt to apply logic to color concepts. One thing he seemed really fascinated by was how some colors can seem to be luminous while others can only be illuminated. For example he pondered whether one could imagine a gray ghost or since it was lit from within it would actually would have to be a dim white which was making it luminous. He asserted that gray was color that could only be lit from outside. He also became very curious about the concept of brown light. Anyhow, these were really interesting to me to as I have been experiencing these colors for years as the most luminous. They contained the richest histories of content which included material compressing itself in time to form these colors. So I felt a shared fascination with him, but with the opposite conclusion about the the luminosity of the these colors.
The Grey Flame and The Brown Light
LB: In earlier projects you have used photography as a kind of output from the system. Here the system appears closed, at least in terms of material excretion. Was this a major question in developing this project?
CH: We’ll it is not exactly closed as the vibrant colors that are generated from these browns and grays will be shown at a future point. As I said previously, there is the aspect of them cycling back into the literal ground of the work, but they are also stored as digital color fields which I will show at some point. There is just a greater delay as they go into “hard drive” storage for a period instead of directly up on the wall.
LB: Before we finish, I would like to ask a bit about the architecture of The Brown Light and The Grey Flame. The work is being made underneath a sloped wooden structure that relates to a gymnasium floor. This element really emphasizes the front/back relationship of the corresponding presentation area/studio which makes the working space into a kind of “behind the scenes” situation. How did you develop this structure?
CH: This structure is a fusion of gymnasium floor and theatrical stage. The front of the stage is covered with wainscoting and the stage itself is made of gymnasium flooring. The gymnasium flooring is constantly being shifted so that the sport demarcations on the wooden sections become abstracted. I was interested in making a “ground” that I could be intermittently underneath and then penetrate to sort “till” it. Like an earthworm.
When you see me through the holes, in the flooring, as well as the sides and back there is a bit of the ant farm to it. A subterranean space that seems at first to reveal itself. A compressed surface that still contains hidden space.
Also like a desktop on a computer screen. A synthetic surface that is a tool, a structure, and a background.
LB: I am really taken with the structure of your metaphors which develop fluidly across technological and biological demarcations. This opens the work up to talking about technology in relation to our own biology(computer/body) or to ecology (society/natural world). I feel in this a retaking of agency as concerns our relationship to the contemporary situation and the mapping of a new set of coordinates. I was wondering how you felt your work relates to these ideas?
CH: This whole idea of nature as existing outside of us is a problematic distinction. Conversations about the natural world often seem to be based on one of two historical assumptions. One is that there is a fixed or steady state of things and that nature is a sort of edenic precondition that we have domesticated and corrupted. The other is that nature is a material that can be shaped to bring about a sort of permaculture which will create a perpetual state of balance. These preconceptions bring those who think about ethical relationships with the natural world into a sort of false dialectic between a search for a permaculture (steady state) or a return to “native” ways (beginnings). Since there is no permanence in the natural world nor was there any such thing as a fixed native culture, I believe we must think in other ways.
I think that looking at the tools we make and use is a really interesting way of considering these relationships. Tools are a type of organic form. As a combined extensions of both the mind and the body, they contain evolving histories of consciousness and use. They also contain potential. Tools are momentary stoppages of larger processes as well as carriers of those processes. I feel agency when I engage with these shifting forms and use of tools in time.
In this piece I wanted to make a immersive tool which uses forms of compressed time(soil, ash, rock) and acts to assert its existence in the present tense. This move from the interior of the color sphere to the surface is an attempt to use color to do that.
*all images copyright Corin Hewitt
