The Brooklyn Rail

Once you turn the corner of the corridor that begins Doug Wheeler’s installation DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 (2024), you see a light-filled niche at a slight distance off to the left while you confront a glowing magenta panel, so potent that it reflects and hovers in the glossy floor you’ve just walked onto. Maybe you’re feeling bold, so you step up to the plane to take a closer look, and that’s when the gallery attendant, standing quietly off to the side, says, “You may enter.” With certain experiences, that statement would draw back the veil and reveal that the solid panel is merely light and mirrors. But Wheeler’s environments are so finely tuned, so exquisitely and exactingly crafted, that it is the destruction of that illusion which permits us fully to enter the field that he has envisioned for us, a hoary atmosphere without shadows, echoes, or edges that is neither white cube nor neutral box.

Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day at David Zwirner permits Wheeler to continue exploring the phenomena that have long occupied him: the possibility of a ganzfeld—a “uniform stimulation field”—and what its effects might be, the recreation of flying in a small plane as a boy and witnessing both day and night depending on which way he turned, and the exercise of control over circumstances to allow us to glimpse the same. This takes the form of a cornerless white enclosure that seems to have the tactility and surface tension of a frozen marshmallow; the texture of the room feels very much like the grain of the black-and white-photos documenting his early attempts at these experiments. The angles that we see within this room are made by the magenta light, which fades into an afterimage within the field, and the sharp cuts in the reflective entryways, visible before we enter and when we turn around to leave. These are necessary for the field to establish itself, and it is to Wheeler’s credit that he does not hide his apparatus or the materials he deploys to achieve it: reinforced fiberglass, flat white titanium dioxide latex, gloss white epoxy, LED light, and a DMX controller that manages the colors and timing of the lights. The illusion of infinity is disturbed when we encounter the slopes that curve into walls. It reasserts itself when we turn away from them.

This is what makes the presence of other visitors so problematic and so vital. Even if they were wearing all white, DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 would remain nearer to the forced perspective of a Bramante apse or Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico than it is to the monochromatic absurdism of the First Communion of Anemic Young Girls in the Snow (1883). As with forced perspective, Wheeler’s environment suggests the room is bigger and its occupants smaller. The actual dismantles the optical, only for the imagination to regain priority. Like the theater, Wheeler’s installation depends on our willing suspension of disbelief, even as he helps it along.

Though perhaps we cannot stay long enough to feel the effects of sensory deprivation—Zwirner limits our time to accommodate all visitors—I nevertheless felt my own presence acutely. Intellectually, I have understood the “empirico-transcendental doublet” unearthed by Michel Foucault, but here, aware of myself and my insertion into this space, knowing that I was disrupting the illusion of the infinite while also being necessary for that impression to manifest itself, I was conscious of the paradox that Focault identified: “he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible.”

And of course, our wonder at the infinite has always relied on our conviction in the absolute, our desire for astonishment working in tandem with our critique of the same. Wheeler’s room attempts an actualization of this, the ethereal and all of the stuff it takes to achieve it. In thinking of Wheeler’s long-ago flight and the art he makes to approximate it for us, I was reminded of Lucretius and the metaphor he conjured of throwing a javelin off the edge of the universe: if it continues, the universe is infinite. If it hits a wall, then we could stand on that wall and throw the spear even further; the universe is infinite. We use the finite to try to understand the incomprehensible.

And so
I’ll follow on, and.…
Twill come to pass
That nowhere can a world’s-end be, and that
The chance for further flight prolongs forever
The flight itself.

–Lucretius, De Rerum Natura