Special Project

At the occasion of the 2008 Aspen Institute conference on
Tibetan Arts and Culture, Doug and Mike Starn were invited
by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Aspen, CO), to curate and
guide the stage design for His Holiness the Dalai Lama
teachings on Sunday July 26th.

The stage design refers to the Tibetan prayer flag tradition in which countless flags are hung out of doors, open to the winds, for the prayers to spread throughout the world. As the flags fade and degrade in the sun and elements, hope and good wishes are spread and renewed as new flags are hung alongside old ones, reminders of virtue, goodness, protection, and happiness, these flags express genuine heartfelt loving kindness.

Floating above His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) was a colorful cloud comprised of 2000 prayer flags handmade by local kids in a common prayer/wish for peace, love and understanding. This mass of flags is unlike a normal display of children’s art, in that the artworks are not meant to be seen individually. It is the interconnected whole, it’s the presence of all of the wonderful and beautiful thoughts and intentions joined together that makes the difference to the artwork/cloud; just as it is all the individual efforts together towards peace that surely make the difference to the world. It is the artists’ intention to not only build the kids up as individuals but to build their awareness that together, as members of society, they can make a difference.

Below the cloud is a snowfall of unique and individual snowflakes created by the kids. Cliché as it is, every real snowflake is a unique, beautiful, ephemeral, a minute and unlikely architecture, so delicate they are barely more than an idea. But in accumulation of staggering and immeasurable amounts create glaciers, leading to the realization that the improbable is possible when all come together.

The kid’s visions are underscored and intermixed with photomicrographs of the unique crystal formations of actual snowflakes photographed by the Starns. Each flake starts as a frozen molecule of H2O with six sides, they each grow differently simply because as they move around in the clouds collecting more frozen water vapor each one is occupying a different microscopic environment than every other burgeoning flake. The final shape of each snowflake is a record of its individual journey from the clouds, before it is eventually reabsorbed into the atmosphere—returning, once again, to the ideas of transmutation and regeneration and impermanence. In the Buddhist tradition and in the Starns’ world, art and science are not in argument; both seek to understand life and the nature of perception. Ultimately, what their work seeks to both personify and provoke is a state of mindfulness in which opposites such as light and dark, or same and different, are not held in a tense equilibrium but rather in dynamic counterpoise.

The Starns’ engagement with Buddhist principles takes many forms, both concrete and abstract. It is present in their photographs of the eighth-century Buddhist monk Ganjin, the archetypal blind seer; it flows through their images of trees and their discarded leaves, symbols of birth and rebirth; and it extends to their unique photographic treatments, in which the passage of time is built in and wholes are made up only by parts. A statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Chinese Buddhist deity of compassion and mercy, for instance, which employs an antique carbon color-printing technique to build an image from successive delicate and ripped layers of prints in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The frail colors shift and swim before the eyes and it is clear the full color is constructed from parts.

Twin brothers Doug and Mike Starn have always insisted on the collaborative nature of their art, a binocular vision that draws on the works of philosophy, art, history, and science. They are enthralled with “the coincidence of opposites,” a yin requiring a yang, and have used it as a springboard for their ontological investigations for more than 20 years. Chief among these is light, both metaphor and manifestation of knowledge. They choose the medium of photography to call attention to the instability of vision and the ephemerality of the moment. But in their search for light to record their images, the camera also becomes an instrument of awakening, a tool to show us the invisible light that describes the world to our eyes and constitutes our unique subjectivity.

 

Behind Your Eye

“…Vision doesn’t work like a camera, the mind is an interpreter of constantly fed information. Not just from your eyes, but also from all of your sensory inputs simultaneously, these are your interfaces to the world. Your mind decodes and understands the information based on a lifetime of constructions, memories, desires and learning…it is through all that that we ‘see’…” D+M S Behind Your Eye: An Installation by Doug and Mike Starn is the artists’ first large-scale project in New York in recent years. It will be shown in the Neuberger Museum of Art’s two largest galleries, a space of more than 10,000 square feet. Behind Your Eye coincides with the release of the publicationAttracted to Light, an exquisitely produced book of the Starns’ extensive conceptual portrait series of the moths’ nocturnal journey and the seeming gravitational force that light has over them. Forming the core of the exhibit are more than 60 images from these photographs: sulfur-toned silver prints on hand coated Thai mulberry paper (that mimic the “dusty” wings of the moths) and film-still lambda digital C-prints derived from footage shot for a project commissioned by the Bohen Foundation and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. The Neuberger Museum’s complete installation incorporates nearly 80 photographs, drawn from three of the Starns’ most recent series, 2 of their transparent illuminated manuscripts and a large-scale 2-channel video projection. Behind Your Eye is curated by Dede Young, Neuberger Museum of Art Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Mike and Doug Starn. “This exhibition presents an intimate look into the artists’ handmade books and their ongoing philosophical and metaphorical dialogues with life, bridging art to physics, biology and cognitive science. The work is based upon the artists’ research and intuitive reflections and interpretations of the transfer of knowledge through an elaborate personal lexicon of metaphors,” says Ms. Young. It will be on view from March 7 through August 8, 2004.

Structure of Thought #7 (walktrough) Behind Your Eye refers not only to the mind but also to visual perception, light and the metaphor of photosensitivity. In their work, the Starns incorporate images of neuronal synaptic arbors overlapped and intertwined with dentritic tree branches, underscoring the connection of the internal and external worlds. The entrance of the Theater Gallery is a site-specific walkthrough Shoji screen (10 x 50-foot photo-collage), Structure of Thought 7. Sliding panels provide access to the exhibition arranged and lit as a study library displaying neuronal scroll tables, the preliminary hand-made books of a 2-volumedos à dos livre d’artiste, and 60 images of nocturnal moths from Attracted to Light, individually encased in lepidoptera-like specimen boxes dispersed on 33 desks. Floating on the far wall of the gallery, a multi-paneled digital video still (ATL Film Still 14, 10 x 30 feet: a constellation of moths, evanescent thresholds into the Starns’ “Gravity of Light” concept), the side gallery walls are flanked with digitally printed segmented leaves (Black Pulse—the discarded photosensitive heart and lungs of trees). In the adjacent gallery, on an ethereal transparent scrim is a large-scale dual-channel video projection, “Structure of Thought” (8 minutes), an approximation of the non-linear process and architecture of thought; a living dendritic accumulation of intersections and layers. “The structure of thought is not sequential. It is layers upon layers of ideas, all connected or able to connect. None of the ideas necessarily comes first; the connections are part of the whole. There is order to this confusion by the simple fact that they are connected. (…) We can’t see where all the limbs go but we know they are separate and connected, like capillaries in your body or in a leaf.” (Lange, 1975) The film renders the processing of information, overlapping layered images of branches and dendrites portraying layered conduits carrying the foundations of thought.

Nowhere to Fall (download video) The Starns have written, “The classical metaphor of light is knowledge and information. Trees are literally a recording of light, growing, through photosynthesis, towards the source. Trees are mostly carbon (and the allotrope of carbon most familiar is black). Black is, in the color spectrum, literally the absorption of all visible light. We use this symbolically in our silhouetted images of trees; in this understanding, we relate the black of body of the trees to the black of written information, the black ink on the pages of books through thousands of years of transcribed thought and creation. The Sun writes of its complex knowledge and describes itself, the trees as containers of comprehensive information and layered knowledge. The interconnectedness of trees-branches over branches into branches. Web, network, synapses, like dendritic neurons in the brain. The network of information and links. The pictogram nature of Chinese calligraphy is in relation to the silhouetted form of trees; the layered dendritic branches are in relation to the complexities of knowledge, understanding, memory and imagination. These trees are light written in the calligraphy of the sun.” Aside to this video are literally illuminated manuscripts; Gravity of Light and Behind My Eye, lit by fiber optic threads and electroluminescent technology bring within a faint light some of the Starns’ rough notes of their interrogations and observations on light, excerpts from Dante’s Paradiso, and reports from astronauts of their sensations in weightlessness, etc… Light is the basis of photography and of vision, it is for the Starns the most powerful force. The gravitational power and force of the sun, the source of light, and the physics of color juxtaposed with the control light has over their chosen subjects, has many coincidences and convergences of physical fact and metaphor. The Starns photograph these subjects and conceive printing techniques to elucidate their metaphors, mixing non-traditional silver printing techniques and hi-technology with digital manipulation. From their satellite-photographed images in the early ’90s, to the macroscopic and microscopic observations of the nature of moths, leaves and neurons, they offer a journey into relativity. Mike and Doug Starn, through their personal semiology, portray new models of the mind and its conception of itself in experiencing the world. “Light is more than enlightenment; it is the gravity of all our past experiences and our future, the conscious and unconscious, the external and internal factors that drive our lives. The pull of gravity that light has over the corporeal body of the moths is like breathing, like thinking, impossible to deny; involuntarily, moth’s wings bring them to the light.” (Demetrio Paparoni, “Tree of Life,” from Attracted to Light; powerHouse, 2003).

Absorption and Transmission

artists’ notes

Absorption + Transmission refers to leaves, trees and photographs absorbing light (and the absorbing of light being its opposite). In almost any culture in the history of the world, light is used as a metaphor for thought, knowledge, intelligence… With this metaphor as our foundation, we recognize that a tree grows toward light, and of course, it uses light in the process of photosynthesis, partly to remove carbon from the air, and important to our metaphor, carbon is the primary matter of the body of the tree. The carbon atom, in most states, is black. Besides black being the absence of light it, is also the complete absorption of light. In fact, in physics terminology, carbon is a “black body radiator”—perfectly absorbing and capable of perfectly emitting all wavelengths of light. Carbon for us is the representation of the absorption of light (figuratively thought and information). The black silhouette of the tree represents the absorbed light. The structure of thought is a living dendritic accumulation of intersections and layers.

We had been working on the series Structure of Thought for a couple of years, and the silhouetted trees already symbolized the layers and layers of sensory input, memories, emotion, imagination and ideas. For us, the dendritic and rhizomatic form presented broad dynamic fluid movement between points all connected or able to connect, so when we stumbled upon the same form in the image of a brain neuron we felt validated. The dendritic form gives the pathway for the complicated and the continually capable of changing connections in the transmission of impulses. And in a delightful coincidence, the way the living neurons are imaged is bioluminenesence (harvested from a jellyfish or firefly) is expressed into a single neuron and the neuron becomes illuminated (and a photomicrograph is taken of it)—the neuron absorbs the light.

–D+M Starn

Gravity of Light

Doug and Mike Starn: Gravity of Light

October 06, 2012 to December 30, 2012

WHERE:

Holy Cross Church at the Mount Adams Monastery

Cincinnati

Since well before the Renaissance, light has been used for and understood as a metaphor for illumination, spiritual or intellectual; light is, of course, the opposite of dark. It is also the primary material of photography. In Gravity of Light, Doug and Mike Starn present a compilation of four series of photographs that extend this classical metaphor. Central to the exhibition is a blindingly bright arc lamp, mimicking the sun—a facsimile of Sir Humphry Davy’s “volaic arc” used in the first discovery of electric “artificial light in 1804.

Equal parts sculpture, scientific experiment and photography, Gravity of Light is as much a system of transmissions as it is an exhibition of object photographs. The Starns’ art does not hold the world in suspension as an object for contemplation, but rather suspends the viewer in a world of their own making—a chamber of sensorial and experiential discovery, that renders each of us conductors; absorbers and emitters of the universe’s energy.

Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop

Big Bambú is a continually growing and changing sculpture that will be constructed during the run of the installation from thousands of fresh-cut bamboo poles—a complex network of 5,000 interlocking 30- and 40-foot-long bamboo poles, which will be lashed together with 50 miles of nylon rope. Doug Starn states: “The reason we had to make it so big is to make all of us feel small—or at least to awaken us to the fact that individually we are not so big. Once we’re aware of our true stature we can feel a part of something much more vast than we could ever have dreamed of before.”

The work will embody a contradictory nature: it is always complete, yet it is always unfinished. Working on the sculpture while the exhibition is open to the public, the artists and teams of rock climbers (six to twenty of whom will be present during different phases of the project) will provide visitors with a rare opportunity to experience their work as it unfolds.

“It is a temporary structure in a sense, but it is a sculpture—not a static sculpture, it’s an organism that we are just a part of—helping it to move along,” said Mike Starn. “We will be constructing a slice of seascape, like our photographs, a cutaway view of a wave constantly in motion—our growth and change remains invariable, it is constant and unchanged.”

This never-resting sculpture will evolve throughout the course of the exhibition: the initial, roughly 30-foot high by 50-foot-wide by 100-foot-long structure will be completed by opening day on April 27; next, the eastern portion of the sculpture will be built up by the artists and rock climbers to an elevation of some 50 feet; and by summer, the western portion of the sculpture will be elevated by the artists and rock climbers to around 40 feet in height. An internal footpath artery system grows within the structure, facilitating the progress of the organism.

The ephemeral state of the work will be documented by the artists in various scale photographs and video.

www.starnstudio.com