The materials checklist for “Day Night Day” (2024), the artist Doug Wheeler’s perception-bending, full-body freak-out at David Zwirner in Chelsea, barely gives anything away: reinforced fiberglass, flat white titanium dioxide latex, gloss white epoxy, LED light — plastic, paint and lightbulbs, essentially. A shopping list easily fulfilled at most local hardware stores. Yet what Wheeler achieves with those materials is astounding in its totalizing effect.
After pulling on hospital booties and entering a slickly antiseptic antechamber, like Heaven’s waiting room as envisioned by someone with a dander allergy,you’re confronted with two phosphorescent thresholds you can’t completely be sure aren’t solid surfaces. (An attendant had to gently encourage me to move into the light.) Crossing them requires a suspension of the self-preservation reflex. The usual markers of solid space — ceiling, floor — are rubbed out.
The effect brings to mind “Duck Amuck,” a particularly Beckettian Looney Tunes short in which Daffy Duck finds himself at the mercy of an unseen animator’s brush, the background scenery repeatedly drained into nothingness. Wheeler provides just two tethers back to steady ground: a slight incline to cue a visitor to the void’s real endpoint; and the mechanics, fully visible above the doorway.
“Day Night Day” is meant to simulate the particular experience of seeing both daylight and the night sky simultaneously, on opposite horizons, a phenomenon Wheeler says he’s encountered while piloting his 1978 Cessna through the Southwest, and one he allows most people never will; part of the animating force here is that of a benevolent god whipping up a taste of celestial wonder.
Whether the effect is faithful is largely unverifiable, unless you too are an aviation hobbyist. The rest of us will have to take the artist’s word that his earthbound translation — a blinding white-out that shifts, almost imperceptibly, into a soft, pre-dawn pink — is what goes on at cruising altitude. More affecting is the retinal payoff, a refinement of Wheeler’s nearly lifelong project, now in its seventh decade, which is to make visible the substance of space itself.
Wheeler has been creating disorienting, physically dispossessing light installations since the late 1960s, steadily improving upon their result. Few artists have been able to induce as acute a sensation of existential dread out of, as it were, thin air. Yet voids have matter too, and in Wheeler’s the particulate nature of light is heightened, almost aerosolized, such that it can feel you’re not so much seeing light as wading through it. Entering a Wheeler room is perhaps the closest you can get to being suspended in pure color. It’s not exactly a pleasant experience. Like meditation or long-distance running, it requires both discomfort and acceptance.
Now 85, Wheeler is an elder statesman of the loosely-affiliated Light and Space movement, the group of artists, including Robert Irwin and James Turrell — other shaman-philosophers of the mystic American West of the mind — that emerged in 1960s Los Angeles as a more soulful branch to the New York cool of Minimalism. Their atmospheric installations and phenomenological concerns came out of a politics of refusal; being as they were effectively ignored by the New York-Europe art dialogue, they lent into that remove and largely rejected the art-object paradigm altogether.
Wheeler is loathe to explain how his art functions, and his work is especially indifferent to the market, costing great sums to produce and huge spaces and effort to exhibit (When it debuted, in 2012, Wheeler’s “SA MI 75 DZ NY 12,” an earlier environment, was the most expensive single installation Zwirner ever produced. That distinction now belongs to “Day Night Day”). Accordingly, they’re rarely on view and seldom collected. (A smaller environment occupies a side room in Zwirner’s own Manhattan home, for anyone curious what it would be like for a void to take up residence off your sitting room.)
Artists have been after this sort of sensorium-scrambling effect since at least 1949, when Lucio Fontana hung hallucinatory, protozoan forms in a black-light gallery. And Zwirner has become a champion of them, mounting multiple iterations of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms.”
A victim of their own popularity, artworks like these have been somewhat ruined by an inflated economy of flimsy, selfie-baiting attractions. Wheeler isn’t interested in A.I., VR, or any other undercooked acronym. His art isn’t indifferent to technology but it doesn’t capitulate to or exploit trendiness either.
A particular beauty of Wheeler’s work is that it exists out of time. It is utterly agnostic toward politics and doesn’t aim to respond to the moment, and so functions as a way station for the overstimulated, exhausted one we’re living through. The cost of that respite is merely to surrender your smartphone at the door, at which point a visitor is allotted two and a half minutes inside. That’s a tight window in which to achieve transcendence. If that sounds like a lofty goal, it shouldn’t. Wheeler is after nothing more than showing us what was always there.
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