ДУГ УИЛЕР

PSAD Synthetic Desert III

source: guggenheimorg
For PSAD Synthetic Desert III (1971), Doug Wheeler has altered the structure and configuration of a museum gallery in order to control optical and acoustic experience. He has transformed the room into a hermetic realm, a “semi-anechoic chamber” designed to minimize noise and induce a sensate impression of infinite space. Wheeler likens this sensation of light and sound to the perception of vast space in the deserts of northern Arizona. While Synthetic Desert is deeply grounded in the artist’s experience of the natural world, the work does not describe the landscape. Its form is strictly abstract.
SOUNDCLOUD

Doug Wheeler Speaks About The Total Experience Of “PSAD Synthetic Desert III”
Wheeler’s work is often associated with West Coast art after 1960, particularly a tendency referred to as Light and Space. The development of Light and Space coincides with Minimalism and shares with it a spare visual language of geometric form. During the early 1960s, Wheeler produced large white abstract paintings that explore pure optical experience. In the middle of the decade, he developed various techniques combining acrylic sheets, lacquer, and neon light, and used these methods in the fabrication of painting-like objects, including a series called “light encasements.” When installed in modified all-white rooms, the encasements emit a hazy luminosity that causes the planar surface of each work to appear fused with the wall. Wheeler abandoned object making altogether in the late 1960s to create immersive environments such as Synthetic Desert, using architectural volume, light, and sound as his primary mediums. The Guggenheim’s production of Synthetic Desert, based on early drawings and completed in close collaboration with the artist, is the first realization of this work.
This presentation of PSAD Synthetic Desert III is organized by Jeffrey Weiss, Senior Curator, and Francesca Esmay, Conservator, Panza Collection, with Melanie Taylor, Director, Exhibition Design. The Guggenheim is also working closely with Raj Patel and Joseph Digerness from Arup, a design firm that specializes in the acoustic properties of built space.
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source: davidzwirner
As a pioneer of the so-called “Light and Space” movement that flourished in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, Doug Wheeler’s prolific and ground-breaking body of work encompasses drawing, painting, and installations that are characterized by a singular experimentation with the perception and experience of space, volume, and light. Raised in the high desert of Arizona, Wheeler began his career as a painter in the early 1960s while studying at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles. According to critic and curator John Coplans, Wheeler’s “primary aim as [an artist] is to reshape or change the spectator’s perception of the seen world. In short, [his] medium is not light or new materials or technology, but perception.”1

Wheeler’s first solo exhibitions were held at the Pasadena Art Museum (1968), Ace Gallery, Venice, California (1969), and Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf (1970). His work was included in a number of important exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s, including Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler(Tate Gallery, London, 1970); Rooms (PS1, New York,1976); Ambiente Arte (Venice Biennale, 1976); and Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1986), among others. More recently, Wheeler’s work was presented in Selections from the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs (Zwirner & Wirth/David Zwirner, 2008); Time & Place: Los Angeles 1957-1968 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2008-2009); Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 (David Zwirner, 2010); and Doug Wheeler (David Zwirner, 2012). He was featured in the 2011-2012 exhibition Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, as part of the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative.

Work by the artist is held in prominent museum collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others. Wheeler lives and works in Santa Fe and Los Angeles.

1John Coplans, Doug Wheeler. Exh. bro. (Pasadena, California: Pasadena Art Museum, 1968), n.p.
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source: nytimes

THE artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York.

The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an “infinity environment,” featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision.

“I thought, ‘O.K., I can stop worrying so much and being mad about them letting people in too early,’ ” Mr. Wheeler said recently over coffee at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, where he has just opened his first solo New York gallery show at the age of 72, remaking a cavernous interior into a kind of immaculate white vacuum tube — the city’s first infinity environment.

The second story he tells happened in the late 1960s, in a former dime store in Venice, Calif., the studio where he first began creating the ethereal, experiential work that made him a founder of the so-called Light and Space movement, along with fellow West Coast artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse. One afternoon Mr. Wheeler welcomed a couple of prominent dealers from a New York gallery — “who shall remain nameless,” he now says tersely — to show off a new work using phosphorus paint and lights to create the sensation of a mistlike plane bisecting part of the studio.

The dealers walked right past the piece without noticing it, making a beeline to some earlier, popular light works that hung on the walls like paintings.

“I just thought what idiots they were for not seeing it,” he said. “Now maybe it wasn’t powerful enough. Maybe it was just my arrogance. But at that time I didn’t think of it that way.”

“What they expected to see, they saw,” he added, “and then they left.”

He bid them a friendly goodbye and never did business with the gallery again.

His career has been punctuated by such decorous but epic refusals. He has said no to major museum exhibitions, because of his doubts that the works would be shown in the way they were intended. In a career of more than four decades he has never had a full-time American gallery represent him except for a brief, troubled turn with the Los Angeles dealer Doug Chrismas. He even once turned down Leo Castelli, at the time the most powerful dealer in the country, because he felt that Castelli wanted to push him to crank out versions of older works, from which “I’d already learned everything I wanted to learn.” (“I heard he told people he thought I was crazy,” Mr. Wheeler said.)

The effect of this deeply principled approach has been that his work has been seen mostly on the West Coast and in Europe, where the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who died in 2010, and his wife, Giovanna, were enthusiastic supporters. Through the Panza collection, Wheeler pieces are now in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn in Washington. But sightings of the work on the East Coast have been few and far between, partly because of the complexity of their installation.

For several years in the mid-1970s Mr. Wheeler grew so frustrated with the art world that he took up screenwriting to support himself, so he could keep making his art his way. (The one result that made it to the screen was a 1978 television trucker movie, “Steel Cowboy,” with James Brolin and Rip Torn, of which Mr. Wheeler says, gratefully, “There was nothing of my work left in it at all.”)

By the ’80s he had left Los Angeles for Santa Fe, N.M., where he still works. When David Zwirner — whose gallery has dug deeply in recent years into the works of Minimalist and ’60s and ’70s West Coast artists — included a Wheeler piece in a show several years ago, Mr. Zwirner said, he considered Mr. Wheeler a “kind of mythical figure.”

“And then we get an e-mail from Doug Wheeler — he exists! — and he was telling us we’d shown the work the wrong way, that it was not just a wall piece,” he recalled. “We’d screwed it up.” But despite the infelicitous introduction he began to pursue Mr. Wheeler and offered to support him in the creation of an infinity environment in New York. (Besides the version in Bilbao, Mr. Wheeler has made works like it only two other times, in 1975 in Milan and in 1983 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.)

Mr. Zwirner said: “I told him: ‘We’ll give you carte blanche. I mean, we have to see a budget, but once we sign off on it, it’s your baby.’ ”

For the last several weeks this baby, made from precisely curved and fitted fiberglass wall sections, special paints and resins and an elaborate combination of lights, has been growing clandestinely inside one of the Zwirner spaces on West 19th Street, behind papered-over windows. The exhibition, titled “SA MI 75 DZ NY 12,” a reference to the initial 1975 work, will be the most expensive single installation ever mounted by the gallery, said Mr. Zwirner, who had been forewarned.

At the beginning, Mr. Wheeler said, he told Mr. Zwirner: “You know it’s really hard to do that kind of piece, don’t you? It’s very hard to create absence.”

Arguably more so than any other Light and Space artist Mr. Wheeler has made the quest to create a sense of absence — to enable people to perceive space and light in ways they normally cannot — a primary obsession. And his explorations of it were deeply influential in the formation of the loose movement of Los Angeles artists who began to work with light.

“Doug was really the first one out of the box with a lot of these ideas, doing things very early on,” said the painter Ed Moses, who experimented with light environments himself in the 1960s. It was a heady, competitive time. “We were all friends,” Mr. Moses said, “but we all wanted to get the first bite of something, not be the guy who got the second bite.”

In subsequent years, he said, he believed Mr. Wheeler’s role as a pioneer had been diminished in Mr. Irwin’s and Mr. Turrell’s favor, perhaps owing partly to the difficulty of both the work and the artist. “Even the museums wouldn’t often do the kinds of things Doug needed them to do, either because of money or because he was just so exacting,” Mr. Moses said. “He got very despondent about the whole thing, but he just kept on working.”

In person Mr. Wheeler can seem at times like a low-key, latter-day New Mexico cowboy, with flowing white hair and Western-accented belts. But his resolve flashes through quickly, particularly in his reticence about being interviewed. (He said he managed to go more than a couple of decades without finally sitting for one again in 2008.) In talking about his work he is painstakingly methodical, particularly in trying to emphasize what it is not.

Works like the infinity room — which over about a half hour will gradually cycle from light that mimics dawn up to full daylight and then down to dusk — are not designed with the end purpose of creating illusion or destabilizing perception. The works are trying instead to use those things as tools to enable an experience of light and space in a much more direct way than is normally possible, “without,” as Mr. Wheeler once wrote, “the diminishing effect of a learned associative response to explain away” the essence of what is being seen.

Growing up in rural Arizona, he said, he sometimes had such visceral experiences of light and space, almost Proustian in their power. They often occurred with his father, a doctor who became well known for barnstorming the state in a Stagger-wing Beechcraft to attend to patients in remote areas. In the air above the desert, the sky seen between massive cloudbanks could take on an otherworldly aspect.

“It created a torquing in space, a tension that I think is something my work has always tried to achieve,” said Mr. Wheeler, who also became a pilot and flies a 1978 Cessna. “When I was growing up, the sky was everything for me.”

Mr. Wheeler’s family life was often tumultuous. There were times when his father would leave him for days with people he barely knew while he flew off to see patients. “That really did a number on me,” he said. He became headstrong and refused baptism in his family’s faith, Seventh Day Adventism, “because I thought that if I got baptized, it would change me, and I’d be like all these other people.” (Today he divides his time between Santa Fe and Los Angeles with his wife, the film producer Bridget Johnson.)

He first began to find himself at Chouinard Art Institute, later the California Institute of the Arts, one of the most important crucibles of postwar Los Angeles talent, with students and faculty like Mr. Irwin, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. “I think I was actually pretty crazy in those days,” Mr. Wheeler said. “When I started school, they made me go see the shrink in order to keep my scholarship.”

Like almost everyone he knew at the time he started out as a painter and made “some ugly, horrible stuff for a while.” But it was a series of early paintings — large, mostly white canvases with polished-looking, bulletlike shapes in the corners — that began to lead him to his work with light. “Looking at them I started to realize that what was really important was the space between things,” he said. This led by the late 1960s to works known as light encasements, squares of monochrome plastic with neon lights embedded along the edges, intended to be installed in white rooms with coved corners.

The curator Germano Celant, who included Mr. Wheeler in an influential exhibition of environment-based art at the 1976 Venice Biennale, said in an interview that he considered the kinds of immersive installations that Mr. Wheeler began to gravitate toward to be radical. “He was avoiding representation of any kind,” said Mr. Celant, who is helping to compile a monograph for the Zwirner show. “There was nothing to see — only light. I think it was a big shift.”

It has always been a shift as unearthly to experience as it is difficult to achieve, at least to Mr. Wheeler’s standards. One day this month, as he surveyed painters slowly turning the inside of the installation a blinding, pristine white, he complained gravely that the floor had not been made the way he had wanted and, toward the end of an interview, he excused himself hurriedly with an exasperated look, saying, “I’m sorry, but I have a real crisis on my hands now.”

Mr. Zwirner, the dealer, said that he hopes to represent Mr. Wheeler permanently, but that he will not allow himself any firm expectation of doing so until the show is over and Mr. Wheeler is happy. “I’m treading very lightly,” he said. “I guess I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
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source: designboom

santa fe, new mexico-based artist doug wheeler has created the interactive light installation ‘SA MI 75 DZ NY 12′ (1975 / 2012) for david zwirner gallery in new york city. the massive luminescent sculpture is formed from reinforced fiberglass, LED lights, high intensity flourescent lights, UV fluorescent lights, quartz halogen lights, and DMX control in order to develop an architecturally modified space, composed of two parts. as the viewer becomes immersed in the sculptural space, light shifts gradually from white to lavender. this 2012 infinity environment is reminiscent of the 1975 sculpture of the same name and measures 564 x 702 inches, accounting for the two portions of the piece.

the atmospheric light installation possesses seemingly infinite depth– the absence of space was manufactured through wheeler’s use of light and apparent lack of hard edges. the room is fitted with meticulously cut fiberglass walls; all corners are rounded and painted with in such a way to enhance the complex lighting implement. the piece is intended to enhance the impact of light so that the gallery goer may leave their experience in fabricated light environment with a profound understanding of spacial perception. the resulting experience of the piece is one of the viewer’s physical interaction with the lack of structure, rather than the materials of the work itself.

though doug wheeler is considered to be one of the pioneers of minimalist light-and-space art, ‘SA MI 75 DZ NY 12′ will be his first solo show in new york.
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source: itsnicethat

Doug Wheeler is kind of a big deal in a field known as “light-and-space art.” Famous since the 1960s for his immersive installations, Wheeler’s exacting attention to detail has produced works that have transformed galleries and influenced countless artists, like Robert Irwin, James Turrel and Olafur Eliasson. His latest creation is a characteristically ambitious piece for the David Zwirner gallery in New York – a light-saturated space designed to simulate an “infinity environment.” Pure white, without edges or sharp corners, this rounded room purposefully leaves viewers without a surface to fix their eyes upon, creating a boundless field of vision.
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source: kulturologiaru

Свет – это очень мощный инструмент. С его помощью можно воздействовать на человека, лишать его сна, покоя. С его помощью можно делать человека красивее или уродливее. Свет делает мир понятнее и безопаснее. А художник Дуг Уилер (Doug Wheeler) помогает людям увидеть при помощи света … бесконечность.

Художники, рисующие светом, создают с его помощью картины. Не важно, стационарные они или временные. В качестве примеров тому можно привести рисунки светом и тенью от Рашада Алакбарова, светящиеся женские силуэты на фотографиях Кристофера Баклоу или светящуюся мечеть Мечеть шейха Зайда в Абу-Даби. А вот американец Дуг Уилер с помощью света делает … ничего.

Его работу с названием «SA MI 75 DZ NY 12» можно сравнить с чистым голубым небом в ясный день или ночным небосводом в безоблачную ночь. То есть с ее помощью можно смотреть в бесконечность. Только бесконечность эта не естественная, обусловленная необозримыми размерами Вселенной, а искусственная, созданная Дугом Уилером при помощи световых инструментов.

Инсталляция «SA MI 75 DZ NY 12» состоит из двух помещений, разделенных прозрачным стеклом: большего, где находится большинство зрителей, и меньшего, куда могут зайти всего пару человек. Обе комнаты созданы в одинаковом тоне стен, который может меняться в зависимости от освещения (но тоже всегда синхронно).

В той комнате, что меньше, сглажены все углы. Поэтому, глядя на нее, у зрителя создается впечатление, будто он смотрит в бесконечность. А человек, который находится там, в этой бесконечности висит. Во всяком случае, так это выглядит со стороны. Для усиления же эффекта полы в этих двух помещениях находятся на разных уровнях.

По задумке Дуга Уилера, благодаря инсталляции «SA MI 75 DZ NY 12», человек станет впредь по-другому воспринимать пространство, свет и бесконечность.