The Brooklyn Rail

I sit cross-legged, my awareness of the world shrunk down to almost nothing. A rich blue glow surrounds me, filling my visual field until only the vaguest sense of physical space remains, pushed all the way to the periphery. Those faint traces are blotted out as the color changes, building until it reaches a purple so intense that it seems to exert physical pressure on the mind. At this moment I’m barely aware of my body, perception free-floating in a boundless expanse of color. However it might sound, I am not deep in meditation, nor have I consumed anything psychedelic. But I might as well have… that is how potent I found the experience of Sunset Enso (2024), one of two works by Hap Tivey, a master of perceptual manipulation, now on view at the George Merck Art Collection in Palm Beach.

Looking at Sunset Enso from GMAC’s entrance, it’s easy to see why the work of Light and Space artists like Tivey have so often been described as a kind of West Coast Minimalism. Here, a white box of aluminum composite, sheet rock, and wood fills the left half of the project space nearly from floor to ceiling. However, most of its front surface gives way to an 86 by 94-inch elliptical cavity with an optical screen at the back that projects a carefully calculated color sequence lasting around nine minutes. A flat upholstered platform provides a place to sit within this large recess, transforming it into an immersive visual environment, and a series of three elegant steps gives access from the floor. The design of these steps evokes traditional Japanese architecture—no accident, as in 1974 and 1975 Tivey trained as a monk in Soja’s Hofuku-ji Zen Monastery. Another work now located in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, Beverly Enso (2015), emphasizes this connection by staging its own circular cavity behind a sliding shoji screen. Sunset Enso has also previously been presented in this way; an image of it installed with a similar screen is reproduced in the announcement of the current exhibition.

The Zen Buddhist aspiration to erase the boundaries that separate self and other is key to Tivey’s artistic aims, but his expertise in the science and technology of perceptual psychology is just as important. Indeed, these two orders of knowledge come together seamlessly in his works, which aim to create what he describes as “eccentric mind states” that reframe the viewer’s relationship to themselves and to the world at large.¹ The light sequence that plays out in the Sunset Enso chamber produces what is known as a Ganzfeld effect, a perceptual phenomenon of absolute visual uniformity and boundlessness. Notably, in the late 1960s Robert Irwin and James Turrell—with whom Tivey collaborated extensively—studied Ganzfeld effects with environmental psychologist Ed Wortz as part of the Art and Technology program initiated by LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman earlier in the decade. Even at the time, Turrell identified a parallel between perceptual psychology and “Eastern thought—their work with meditation.”²

Tivey pushes this connection further, deploying Ganzfeld technology to great effect. The artist’s fine control of the ever-changing light hues in Sunset Enso, for instance, allows him to modulate the intensity of its effect, bringing the viewer to a near-hallucinatory state as the ability to make visual distinctions of any kind is overwhelmed, and then pulling them back to faint awareness of the physically bounded room they inhabit. This creates a kind of dialectic effect, a push-pull that makes the periodic visual crescendos of his light sequence yet more intense. I was reminded of Kazimir Malevich’s “white on white” series of 1916 and 1918, in which the artist’s attention was redirected from earlier critiques of representation to an investigation of visual perception itself. In these paintings, Malevich used a reduced formal vocabulary and near-monochrome palette to simultaneously define and break down the distinction between figure and ground—the most fundamental structure of visual perception. To Malevich, this was a spiritual project, a way of actively transforming perception to give access to higher, non-material registers of reality. I suspect that Tivey might look at Malevich’s aims, although perhaps not his methods, with sympathy.

There are many others in the history of modernist image-making who have approached such perceptual questions in ways that resonate with Tivey’s practice. In his “Equivalents” series, for example, Alfred Stieglitz pointed a camera straight up to photograph cloudy skies without the reference point of a horizon line. Although not a uniform visual field, these images nonetheless create something close to a Ganzfeld effect. In fact, a 1976 text on Tivey by Melinda Wortz notes that ganzfeld experimentation has been used to train pilots, who can easily lose their sense of spatial orientation without reference to the horizon and “often unwittingly fly upside down in bad weather.”³ Harold Rosenberg’s description of the “abstract sublime,” in which the viewing self is dissolved in “boundless” and “inexhaustible” paintings by artists like Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, is also a useful and more proximate point of reference.⁴ Newman’s luminescent, enveloping color fields seem particularly relevant, especially considering his retrospective construction as a Minimalist avant-la-lettre.⁵

These associations are brought into clearer focus by the second work currently on view at GMAC, Helios III (2023). An illuminated 46 by 48-inch rectangle affixed to the wall, Helios seems a much more modest proposition than Sunset Enso. But it traffics in the same perceptual effects, projecting a 12-minute light sequence that is just as precisely calibrated as its monumental counterpart. Tivey conceived the “Helios” series as a more accessible point of entry to his artistic project, so it is no surprise that this work presents itself in much the same way as a painting. At the same time, however, Tivey goes out of his way to make it clear that this is an object, not an image. The work extends a full six inches from the wall, endowing it with a weighty, slab-like presence. And its surface ripples, concave across the vertical axis and convex along the horizontal. Helios III seems to reach out to you, suggesting an ability to envelop the viewer physically as well as optically. This gives it a genuinely environmental effect.

Part painting, part object, part environment, a work like Helios III casts us back to Tivey’s formative years in the sixties, when many attempted to find a way past the restrictive formalism popularized by high modernist critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. The New York Minimalists, often described as having paved the way for Light and Space and the related “Finish Fetish” sensibility on the West Coast, created objects that emphasized the self-evident qualities of the materials they used. In this sense their work was a perversely three-dimensional extrapolation of the formalist emphasis on painting that acknowledges its own material flatness and delimitation. But Tivey and his colleagues have taken a different, more pragmatic approach. Their materials are simply means to an end: an investigation of perception that ultimately stresses the experience of de-materialization.⁶

This perspective is one of the many valuable things that directly experiencing Sunset Enso and Helios III can offer. Even for those of us who enjoy thinking through the intellectual and historical background of this remarkable body of work, the fine distinctions that preoccupied thinkers like Greenberg or Donald Judd must ultimately recede into the background. Inside Sunset Enso, as Tivey’s colors wash over you, they simply don’t matter much. As the title of the exhibition tells us, Perception is the Medium.