In recounting
an actual imprisonment, James Turrell has described
how he worked through claustrophobia by giving himself
up to the confining darkness. Following that act of
resignation, “the mind manufactured a bigger
space,” and he saw “the light that is
always within darkness.”3
That paradox underlies Turrell’s exploration
of color and introduces Anne Scheid’s investigation
into the dualism of darkness and light. Just as a
floodlit room can "open" to the illusion
of a window, a dark space can hollow itself so that
it seems a frame. The frame, elongated, becomes a
door, a portal that is not only a place but a passageway.
In Scheid’s A Step In The Dark, the doorway
opens to a succession of metaphorical thresholds:
the sequence of suspended scrims that the viewer walks
around and the indivdual scrim that he can, up close,
see through.
Twisting into darkness, the spiralling path is radiant
with light. Its components are sheets of waxed paper
(12’ x 40") suspended from the 12-foot
ceiling. On these long banners, Scheid has drawn figures
in charcoal. Giant, they confront the viewer. Upside
down, they throw him off balance. Translucent and
wavering, the screens are cloudy windows and ironic
mirrors.
While the screens emanate light, the deep red walls
absorb, deflect, and cast it back. On the walls, the
charcoal lines of the scrims give way to white chalk.
More abstracted than the figures on the scrims, the
walls’ lines investigate, turning into and tracing
back. Hectic and elegant, Scheid’s line is a
species of inquiry. As such, it recalls Eva Hesse’s
comment on her drawing: “It is my main concern
to go beyond what I know and what I cannot know.”4
On the red walls of A Step In The Dark, the metaphor
of moving through darkness becomes literal. The line
here exemplifies the Judaeo-Christian explanation
of creation as an act of division: the progressive
separation of light from darkness, firmanent from
water, order from chaos, etc. In a similar way, Scheid’s
line divides form from space, being from non-being,
the figure from the ground.
Life-size figures overlap and intersect each other.
The white line that describes the form also, at times,
blots it out. The ambiguity between the line that
delineates and the line that dissolves recalls Scheid’s
breathtaking installation, Meeting (1989) that followed
from her journey to Japan. Again, the drama of becoming
is enhanced by the process of erasure. The white scrims
that individually mimic doorways and successively
imply a path, recall, too Scheid’s recent series
of vertical pastel drawings (8’ x 36")
in which she juxtaposed an obscured figure with a
similarily suppressed typos or sign. While the Westerner
imagines duality as one thing alongside another, as
if in opposition (e.g., the diptych: two sides of
a question, etc.), the Eastern mind positions one
thing on top of another, as if to imply completion
(e.g., the ideograms of I Ching; the symbol for yin/yang,
etc.) Thus, when a chair floated on top of a figure,
as in Nothing Bit Questions And This Moment (pastel
on paper 1989), the top and bottom images implied
a state of balance, if not a resolution or an answer.
If that series, entitled Inquiries, meditated on
a state of tenuous equilibrium, A Step In The Dark,
in contrast, addresses what it means to be cast forth—off
balance (falling) and alone. The spiraling light path
contained by the red walls suggests both the birth
canal and the death tunnel—the separation of
the self from its physical origins or from its emotional
past. Because th figures are upside down, they replay
manifold versions of the Fall—from godhead,
from good, from Paradise, et al. By flooding the falling
figures with light, however, Scheid implies an ironic
transfiguration.
Finally, Scheid’s eloquent, gestural line does
not contain, as Matisse’s did, the form. Instead,
it indicates the form’s dissolution and, at
times, its metamorphosis. Scheid’s line moves;
it describes movement. As such, it resists closure.
Because Scheid’s drawing is charged with both
anxiety and exhilaration, it diverts attention away
from itself and toward the artist. It is what Zucari
called disegno interno, inner drawing.5
It chronicles an internal event; it is process. Invoking
the forma spiritual, it moves toward light, toward
the epiphany of light.
Maureen Bloomfield*
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1 Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New
York): Rizzoli, 1984), p.384
2 Louise Gluck, “Cottonmouth Country,”
Firstborn (New York: New American Library, 1968),
p,41.
3 James Turrrell, Perceptual Cells, exhibition catalogue
edited by Jiri Svestka (Dusseldorf: 1992), p.57.
4 Eva Hesse, Lines Of Vision: Drawings By Contemporary
Women, edited by Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner (New
York: Hudson Hills Press), p. 74.
5 Charles de Tolnay, History and Technique Of Old
Mater Drawings (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1972),
p.7.
Maureen Bloomfield’s art criticism
has appeared in ARTFORUM, ARTnews, Dialogue, The New
Art Examiner, and Sculpture. The Ohio Arts Council
has awarded her four grants for criticism.
Exhibition Catalog for A Step In
The Dark
Fresno Art Museum September – October 1994
By Maureen Bloomfield
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