Eric Orr’s work belongs to the tradition of art that seeks to penetrate the zone of immateriality. His early works—buried lights, walled-in sounds, shadows, silences—attempted to designate a mysterious edge between dissolution and solidity, immaterial and material, where contradictions push and pull into a primal balance; his “light-and-space” installations of the seventies extended this preoccupation, attempting to dissolve awareness of spatial and temporal boundaries. Similar themes informed a series of wall objects that used shamanic and alchemical materials (lead and gold; human blood, bone, and bone ash; various stones, including meteorite; dust from Cheops’ Great Pyramid; a limited range of added colors).
Orr’s new works recall these themes while also extending them. Twenty-two works were exhibited in a varied and ambitious show, which included three wall installations, one environment, seventeen wall objects (including a painting), and one freestanding sculpture.
The wall objects mostly extend Orr’s “Chemical Light” series of 1977. Sheets of lead, wrapped tightly on wooden frames, are striated lightly and finished with such materials as gold, blood, and powdered bone, as well as meteorite dust and volcanic ash. The alchemical associations of the materials are reinforced by iconographic elements that echo, at a great distance, the ancient Egyptian art by which Orr has been greatly influenced.
Two pieces from this group represent a new, more painterly direction in Orr’s work. The Archeology of Painting is a large three-by-nine-foot composite work. A sheet of lead is wrapped on a wooden frame and almost completely covered with linen, leaving a lead border. The linen is sprayed with a pigment made of oil paint, industrial carbon, and carbonized human femur and skull bones. Added lines of blood and meteorite dust frame and compose the area of sprayed pigment, which drifts or fades from black to cloudy gray, with ragged upright forms alternately gashing and thickening the surface. The piece has a wave-like presence and an edge-of-the-night transitionality. Blood Shadow, three by nine feet, combines lead, glass, gold leaf, meteorite dust, human blood, and pyramid dust in a riverine vertical flow. Except for the lead and gold, the materials do not declare themselves as themselves, but contribute to a metaphysical illusionism with hints of iconographic representation; these pieces are approaches to nihility.
At a time when light-and-space art is sometimes regarded as a vein that has run out, Orr is investigating new directions for the genre. Two installations, Thin Man and Prior, were sheets of naval bronze (both 9 by 88 inches) mounted on the wall, each with a central slit (one 1/8 inch, the other 1/16 inch) running almost from top to bottom. Through these slits the room on the other side of the wall was visible and a subtle interplay arose between the light from behind, flowing through the slits and titillating their edges, and the light in front, creating a constant slow dance on the rippled surface as the day passed.
Blue Void was a slab of highly polished black granite (2 feet by 94 inches) installed high up on a wall, with a nearly square opening (14 by 15 inches) near the top giving directly on the sky. Daylight, surprisingly bright and dynamic-seeming (even for California), flowed over and dematerialized the edges and corners of the black stone frame. The familiar dialectic of depth and flatness is carried to a limit here: at certain distances the opening flattens into a picture plane or a figure on the black stone ground; at others it opens directly into infinite depth, which is laid bare with all possible frankness—a piece of emptiness packaged in granite.
This shifting among the categories of solid object, picture plane with illusion of depth, and opening with real depth, both phenomenological in its playing with perceptions and metaphysical in its suggestion of transmutations of the immaterial, is most fully realized in the environment, Time Shadow. Entering through a lead door in a lead wall, one finds oneself in a short corridor, insulated for silence, lined with gray scrim, and dimly lighted from the other end. As one approaches the light, a seat is found, perpendicular to the axis of the corridor and set in a niche. From there, one gazes through a sharp-edged rectangular aperture (16^^1/2^^ by 11 inches) in the facing wall. Behind the aperture, a highly polished gold mirror catches sky light through a hole in the wall. Reflected in gold, the light floods the opening with a softer intensity than did the direct light of Blue Void; the light, which in that piece gleamed aggressively through the black granite, here lies with a serene solidity, like a palpable material, upon the gold mirror. The piece lays an unusually strong claim to the “meditative” quality so often attributed to this kind of work; the immobility forced on the viewer by the seat, and the experience of gazing forward at a patch of color have correlatives in certain techniques of actual meditation. Again, various conceptual dialectics are produced, not least of which is the strange delight of seeing the sky in an unexpected place—straight ahead at eye level. The heavily framed rectangle on the wall also suggests a picture gallery. (This piece will remain on view at Ovsey’s until the end of 1981.)
The exhibition was elegant and handsomely installed, and the variety of works commented intelligently (if somewhat polemically) on critical questions such as the requirement of a strictly signatured oeuvre and the viability of light-and-space installations for the eighties. It was an impressive example of California art, confidently yet sensitively pressing its exploration of new avenues to the immaterial.
—Thomas McEvilley
