MIKE + DOUG STARN: Big Bambú

The Starns often incorporate images of neuronal synaptic arbors overlapped and intertwined with dentritic tree branches, underscoring the connection of the internal and external worlds.

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).

Descartes claimed that the blind see with their hands; it is a positivist view that to touch something, to determine its contours, is to know it: I “see” it, therefore it is. But this idea does not so much redress but renew the gulf between seeing and knowing: the classic mind-body problem. Centuries later, the French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty refocused Descartes’ analysis. “There is no vision without thought,” he wrote. “But it is not enough to think in order to see.” In other words, our bodies—our vision—are the permanent condition of our experience, and thought is born by what happens in and on the body. We are conductors; absorbers and emitters of the universe’s energy.

A leaf falls from a tree. A flash of light crosses a shadowed statue. A snowflake dissolves in the air. And in a darkened exhibition hall, an icy blue radiance sizzles and flashes.

Gravity of Light, as much a system of transmissions as an exhibition of objects for contemplation. Part sculpture, part scientific experiment, the peculiar thirteen-foot-tall mechanical structure at its center was titled Leonardo’s St. John or This is my Middle Finger (2005). In the painting by da Vinci (himself an artist-inventor and maker of meaning), John the Baptist points his finger to the heavens, indicating the path to enlightenment. In the Starns’ carbon arc lamp—an adaptation of an 1804 model by British physicist Humphry Davy—electrifies that light with carbon-rod “fingers” that conduct a current between their respective nodes, producing a brilliant point of light too dazzling for the naked eye. Taped like a notice to the lamp’s stem is a copy of the Leonardo painting. However, in the Starns’ version, St. John’s gesture of benediction has been digitally replaced by one of profanity. 

 
As Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, writes, this gesture “is like a rebuff, aimed at paltry human confidence in the face of eternity. Pure light is the carrier of this awesome power, at once the message and the messenger. And the news is this: light can bring, in equal measure, life and destruction, energy and fear, illumination and obscurity.”

The lamp casts light on seven of their elemental photographs, all of which have harnessed the power of light in ways both literal and poetic. These monumentally scaled photographs become chapels in an industrial cathedral. Their subjects are both emblems of and witnesses to the dualistic character of light, with its power to give life and to destroy it, to illuminate and to blind. The ill-fated moths of the Attracted to Light series are caught moments before self-immolation, drawn to the light that kills them, their images pinned, momentarily, on photographic paper. Across the gallery, abstracted growths that could be trees—or a neural cell’s dendrites—take root in the Structure of Thought series. The gnarled branches are, in effect, the sun’s signature. The leaf, the fruit of the branch, falls away in Black Pulse and Black Pulse Lambda. These desiccated leaves, recorded in filigreed detail, signal both decay and renewal; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Lastly, there is the towering image of a Bodhisattva, the eighth-century Buddhist monk Ganjin, who, though blind, found illumination within.

Descartes claimed that the blind see with their hands; it is a positivist view that to touch something, to determine its contours, is to know it: I “see” it, therefore it is. But this idea does not so much redress but renew the gulf between seeing and knowing: the classic mind-body problem. Centuries later, the French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty refocused Descartes’ analysis. “There is no vision without thought,” he wrote. “But it is not enough to think in order to see.” In other words, our bodies—our vision—are the permanent condition of our experience, and thought is born by what happens in and on the body. We are conductors; absorbers and emitters of the universe’s energy.

 
Gravity of Light represents a remarkable body of work in which all parts depend on the whole, representing not a flattening of difference but a deepening. Opposites like black and white, light and dark, art and science, the eternal and the ephemeral are revealed not only as false dichotomies, but as necessarily dialectical relationships—each casts new light upon the other. Merleau-Ponty characterizes this as akin to one’s left hand shaking one’s right. But as the fleeting light of the lamp makes clear, our grip on reality is only as strong as the one hand shaking the other. The flesh feels only as solid as the answering pressure.

With Gravity of Light, the Starns upended the trees, plumbed a reservoir in a void, pointed a middle finger to the heavens, and exposed the flesh of contingency. The Starns’ art does not hold the world in suspension as an object for contemplation, but rather suspends the viewer in the world.