Playing with the past while examining the fault lines of memory

At Mass MoCA, Finch ponders limits of knowing

June 22, 2007|Ken Johnson, Globe Staff

NORTH ADAMS -- Do you remember the color of the pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wore on the day her husband was assassinated? It was pink, that's right, but do you know exactly what shade of pink? Could you reproduce the precisely matching color using, say, paint or crayons? That's what Spencer Finch set out to do in a series of 100 pastel drawings he made in 1994, each a simple, face-size oval of a different shade of pink.

Like many of the works in Finch's slyly illuminating exhibition "What Time Is It on the Sun?" at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, "Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy's Pillbox Hat" raises a host of intriguing philosophical questions about perception, memory, knowledge, and truth. The drawings and most of the works in the show are more interesting to think about than to look at, but with Finch's art, it's the thought that counts.

A New York-based artist with a considerable resume of international exhibiting over the past 10 years, Finch re - creates sensory experiences of light, darkness, color, and wind using a variety of unconventional means including electric lights, video monitors, and electric fans. He is, you might say, Postmodernist Impressionist. As Mass MoCA's survey of works dating from 1993 to the present shows, his larger mission is to prompt us to ponder age - old epistemological questions: How do we know what we think we know? What can we know, if anything, for certain?

Getting back to Jackie's hat, how would we know which of the 100 drawings matches -- or comes close to matching -- Finch's memory? He doesn't tell us which, if any, does. But then, given the mercurial nature of memory, how would the artist himself know for sure which is the right pink?

Born as he was in 1962, it's unlikely he saw it first hand, so whatever he does remember would have to be based on old photographs or films, which themselves may be unreliable. Assuming the hat still exists somewhere (and hasn't faded), it might be possible to discover whether any of the drawings does match its color. But only Finch would know whether his idea of the color is close to the hat's actual color or to that of one of his drawings.

A similar question arises in a set of 102 ink drawings from 2002, each a Rorschach-type blot made from a color that Finch says appeared in a dream. Who could verify that any one of these colors is true to a color that only ever existed in the mind of the artist? No one could -- maybe not even the artist -- and that's the point. The harder you study how we know things, the more mysterious knowing becomes.