Milton’s Gray Wall

I am not certain where this would be filed, under painting or under obscuring.  During my senior year at Michigan I took a final course from my mentor, Milton Cohen.  A short back story on Milton:  while he had been hired as a painter, he no longer painted.  He was instead known for his Space Theater,  multimedia performance Art which he had presented in Venice at the Biennale, in 1964.  Milton’s Art could not be hung on a wall.  It might better be described as projected on a wall, then gone.  Anyone who took his classes understood there would be no art materials involved, no paint, no canvas, no paper.

Milton believed that as the world was becoming over-populated, it was also being swamped by the things that humans create, things being used and pitched out.  He went so far as to state that there is already more art than is necessary.  He was for an Art that is here and then gone, an art that does not add to the already overflowing trash heaps of civilization.  He was for an Art that catches people off guard, then melts away.  Milton was no longer a painter.  He would have suggested his students plant a real tree rather than waste paint on a two-dimensional happy tree.

The course was called Light and Motion, yet never stayed the same. I had already taken a couple semesters from Milton, so knew to not expect anything or rather to not try to anticipate anything. It was perhaps during this particular group assignment where I got the notion that being a student in a contemporary artmaking class was more about following directions of the professor and later trying to figure out what the lesson was about.  The value in the task was not in the task.  It was also not one of those silly assignments meant to be “spontaneous” or “faux-creative”.  There was always some unrevealed, often subtle lesson to be discovered.  Or there wasn’t.

This particular class assignment was a communal project.  Each member of the class was to do the same thing.  There was no deviation, no individual “expression”, nothing personal.  Each student contributed to the project in the same way as each other class member.  There were no leaders, no followers.  No one had an inkling of what was going on except at the moment.

Gigantic stacks of plywood disks appeared in the studio, each disk the same diameter as all others.   Cans of oil-based enamel paint and brushes were evenly distributed amongst the students.  One side of each disk was to be painted gray.  Enamel dries slowly.  The next day, after the gray was dried the other side would be painted red or blue or yellow or black or white or gray.

When both sides were completely dry  a small hole was drilled in the center of each disk.  Each of us had painted both sides of thirty-six circles. Two days of non-creating were filled more with the breathing of paint fumes than anything else.  When the last student had painted the last disk every student wondered  how there could possibly be any value to such a task?  This was little more than busy work.  Having had experienced two previous courses, I said nothing.  There was nothing to say.  I certainly had no idea where this was going.  I had learned, as I said, to not anticipate.  As the second side of the disks dried the windows were opened and Milton took the entire class down the street on a mass coffee break.

As we walked to the coffee house, not a single student commented on nor seemed to notice that we had passed a construction screen, a six-foot-high temporary plywood wall.  The wall masked activity behind it from public view.  Work was in progress.  Yes, it was a real construction site and those interested knew some new building would appear behind the wall, but for the time being a blank barrier kept people out.  There was nothing to see until it was ready to be seen. The wall was painted gray.   We drank our coffee and nibbled cherry donuts.  Nothing was said about that wall.  At the coffee shop Milton gave a short lecture about Magic Squares. Our overnight assignment was to construct a magical, numerical square, six by six.  In a magic square all rows and columns add up to the same sum. As no one mentioned the blank wall, nothing was said about it.

The following day all were given thirty-six long screws, a screwdriver, and thirty-six short metal tubes.   Nothing creative had happened in the classes and nothing would.  Nothing to express ourselves was about to take place.  We were simply about to execute a communal work project, one that had no message, no point and one in which no one had any investment.  You have already correctly assumed it had something to do with the long gray plywood wall.  The class spread out evenly along the wall.  Using a carpenter’s snapline each student was given a six-by-six grid at the intersection of the lines the student would poke the long screw through the disk’s central hole, slide the metal tube, like a washer, on the screw and fasten the disk/screw/tube unit by screwing it into the gray plywood wall.  Each student would arrange the disks with the gray side out and the colored side in the same order as they had arranged the numbers of their magic square.    Red, yellow, blue, black, white, gray would face the wall.

The completed wall, on a normal cloudy and overcast Michigan day, looked like nothing.  The gray disks on gray were nearly invisible.  One could walk right past without noticing the disks.  The effect on such a day was underwhelming.

Under different conditions different things might be noticed by anyone with eyeballs wishing to see magic.

For instance, as the sun crossed the sky the disks would cast shadows, not unlike so many sundials in transit.  Then, as the sun reached a certain point sunlight would bounce off the gray wall and the red, yellow, blue, black, gray, and white backsides would cause the dull gray wall to shimmer in a pattern of otherwise hidden magical squares………….where all rows and all columns add up.

As is often said, there is nothing to see until you see it.

Postscript- to my knowledge the way the colors glowed was too subtle to be photographed, so no pictures memorialize the wall.  The wall was only up for so long as it was needed.  Not being an artwork, disks one by one vanished, perhaps to be tossed like unsatisfactory and free Frisbees. Eventually, the entire wall was dismantled and became landfill with no regrets.  With or without the quietly magic disks it was going to be landfill.