The Importance of Daydreams

As a man lies down on a picnic blanket, he gazes up at the sky. He appears to be absorbed in a daydream. This glimpse of inactivity is quickly narrated away as the film gets under way. In Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten (1977), this narration establishes the logic of the film, which shows a bird’s eye view of an area visible 10⁰ (or one) meter away from earth, where we see this man and a woman. The film reveals what is visible as the distance from Earth increases by a power of ten every ten seconds. At the peak distance, 10²⁴m (or 100 million light years away), the Earth and even the Milky Way Galaxy are indistinguishable amongst the specks of light in the “emptiness like dust.” Statements and facts loaded with meditative, even spiritual potential leak out of the film’s armature of certainty and logic. The film situates the observer in the clouds, in the universe, in a distant emptiness. Here is a place where one could be comforted by the logic of the Powers of Ten or wonder at the implications of this immensity.

In the optimistic culture surrounding early computers – this film was made for IBM – and the belief in their efficacy, the numbers one and zero and their combinations made all the sense there ever needed to be. Watching the film from outside this context, the corporate culture and modernist point of view, one can observe the structure and also what it cannot measure. This, too, is one of the possibilities of daydreaming: setting oneself at a mental remove. Daydreaming is a state of mind that is more associative, less vertical or hierarchic, more horizontal. Though it can benefit from training, the progression of thoughts does not follow the rules of structured realms of knowledge.

In Chris Sauter’s eight hour long video Empire (2006), a fixed-frame view of a tower-like structure never changes, except for the fluttering American flag and the clouds drifting in real time. Without knowing the iconography of Sauter’s work, one searches for clues as to why this work moves so slowly, or why it does not move at all. The work is meditative, harking a moving-picture version of Hudson River paintings, but the title “Empire” and the looming tower, which is in fact the Pioneer Flour Mill from Sauter’s hometown San Antonio, suggest that the scene is not just idyllic. The references to imperialism cumulate with the contextualization of this fortress-like edifice– the grain elevator was built in 1922 by an immigrant from Germany, signaling the growth of his business in agro-industry.¹

It still looms over the treetops, a reminder of other types of occupation than just the American kind. Patterns of occupation by many different groups complicate ideas of dominance.

Pondering the state of our world and our country’s place in it can lead to concerns about what an individual can do in the face of all these overbearing forces – the laws of mathematics or geo-political tendencies. Meredyth Sparks’ 2008 diptych appropriates images from an American (and British) period of resistance – the mid-70s. On the left is a blown up copy of the picture from the cover of Neil Young’s 2^nd solo album, Everyone Knows This is Nowhere, the same name as the work’s title. Cast in shadow, a confident Young leans against a tree, a pose often used in eighteenth century landscape painting, signaling the (big) man’s place in his world. The image on the right is likely an image of a cool, aloof Young. He was an anti-war activist, but these images project an air of hip-ness. Now, for one to cultivate such an image is to seek out the appearance and not often enough the substance of such an identity. Underneath Sparks’ pseudo-Constructivist vinyl and paint graffiti, both images flatten out, as ineffective as any artistic effort at using geometry to call out revolutionary ideas. Sparks self-consciously bookends these references, suggesting futility, in the face of which the only respectable answer is irony.

With this work Sparks suppresses the optimistic thoughtfulness suggested in Young’s pose, crossing out his presence. Instead she oscillates between her ambition – to be a successful artist, to make a mark – and the suspicion that making a mark may be a fruitless effort. Oscillation, then, is another possible explanation for vacant looks on daydreamers’ faces. Faced with too many choices, it is difficult to decide where one stands, where is the answer.

There is not one answer. Or, at least, that is not the point. There are the answers, whether mathematics or politics, and what we do in between them, or the way in which we face them. In her video Let’s Go Get Lost (2001), Natalia Benedetti shows an upside-down view of the world, mirroring the floating sensation of a hand surfing car-side wind. Mitzi Pedersen’s sculpture, a slender stick about 6 feet long, is the hypotenuse that seems to bend between the wall and the rock on the floor. This is only a trick of the light. Elegant form both suggests and confounds numerical expression.

Such contradictions emanate throughout the exhibition. For Crossroads (1975) Bruce Conner edited the US Government’s raw footage of the explosion of the fifth nuclear bomb detonated by the US. The underwater detonation of the bomb called Baker was part of an experiment called Operation Crossroads, which was meant to assess the effect of a nuclear blast on naval vessels and living animals on board them.

The first sequence shows the real time vista of a shoreline with ships far off on the horizon. Signs of life are not ascertainable. A few minutes in, a vertical pillar of water shoots up into the sky, obscuring the ships in its area. A hemispherical cloud forms. The mist dissipates, revealing a cauliflower cloud. At this point the sound of the bomb reaches the camera, piercing the sense of awe that such a cloud inspires. The top of the cauliflower collapses. In the next chapter of the film, Conner edits together different 27 different perspectives of the explosion, from water level and the air. Layered electronic music, a soundtrack by Terry Riley, accompanies this sequence. Here the cloud is evidence of one of the most terrible deeds of mankind, perpetrated by this country. It is also the object of the fascinated – and detached – gaze. Lulled by the music, one is lost in the need to watch the traumatic event over and over.

With this film, Conner rearranged the raw material of scientific observation, drawing out not the statistics but the emotional dimensions of the experiment. At the end of the film, a close-up shows a peaceful sea, with a ship in the near distance. Out of nowhere, a mist obscures it, rendering it a ghost ship. The current in the foreground continues flowing, as though nothing happened. Gradually the ship returns to view; at this distance we are too close to see the cause.

As one moves even closer in on the man in Powers of Ten, a distance of 10^-16 units, inside an atom of the human body, inside a proton, the specks of light in the outer universe seem indistinguishable from the staticky image of a quark. This numerical image does not capture the more intimate aspects of being, as in a verbal accounting of a woman’s attachment to her dog Luca-boy over a great distance and her account of her reaction to his death. A sound piece, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Hour of Prayer (2005) sounds like a confidence. She describes the messy emotions in a level, measured tone: grief, ideas of identity and home, and friendship. The narrative draws together observations of her immediate surroundings with accounts of a psychic connection with Luca, interspersing speech with sounds, like the thumping of an x-ray machine, or a heartbeat. “On that day death entered our house and time abandoned us there alone. I took my feet off the ground and curled my feet up under me and tried just to be.” Enter the sound of rain. “The two of us were alone again. And being at home felt empty and pointless. It looked as though all the objects had slid further away and become anonymous. I felt like part of my senses had been amputated and that everything around me had lost its identity.” Wind sounds then city traffic sounds replace her voice. Marking the immediacy of the present, the peripheral sounds substantiate her story.

With fears and emotions, facts and figures, these artworks, or the observation of a certain absurdity in them, suggest truths that elude other avenues of accounting or artistic expression. The bricks of knowledge and the structures they create are as important as the way we exist within and around them.

¹ Anjali Gupta, “Chris Sauter: San Antonio,” Artpapers 30, no 6 (2006): 67.
² James P. Delgado, et al., The Archeology of the Atomic Bomb - A Submerged Cultural Resources Assessment of the Sunken Fleet of Operation Crossroads at Bikini and Kwajalein Atoll Lagoons, http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/swcrc/37/index.htm. Accessed 07-01-2009. National Park Service, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1991, especially Chapter Two. The Baker bomb was detonated on 25 July 1946.

Tyler Emerson-Dorsch is currently partner at Dorsch Gallery in Miami, FL. She has curated and co-curated shows at the gallery and the Frost Museum at FIU, both in Miami. She completed her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in 2008, having written a thesis focusing on video art. In 2007 she assisted Darsie Alexander on the exhibition catalog for Franz West, published by Baltimore Art Museum. She worked at Miami Art Museum and then Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami.  She has a BA in Art History from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.