Farr Ligvani: Evolution, From Thing to Itself
Peter Frank
Plying the border between science and art – a border sometimes as wide as a gulf, sometimes a mere capstone in a heath – Farr Ligvani has also been traveling the realm of philosophy. Given that all three fields of inquiry address themselves to existential questions, and that those questions reveal, almost beyond anything else, the variability, even fragility, of human perception, it is appropriate that Ligvani’s observations manifest as artworks. And it is even more appropriate that these artworks evolve in form even as they home in on the materials and circumstances he examines.
That said, it is important to identify the current stage of Ligvani’s artistic evolution as, in context, momentous. He has left behind the chart-like, emphatically textured tableaux by which he demonstrated his concept of “obstacleism” over the past decade or more, going on to a more purely abstract – or, in fact, more purely concrete – style. Having exercised, on a didactic as well as aesthetic level, an approach dependent on notation and on surface incident, Ligvani has now, in his words, moved “from theory... into reality, in tangible 3-dimensional forms” (hence the fact that they are now “concrete”). He calls this an “evolution of potential into actualization.”
Appropriately, then, the inaugural display of these new works is titled “Evolution: Noumenon to Phenomenon,” describing the passage of Ligvani’s method from presentation of a self-enclosed, self-sustaining system to presentation of how that system manifests in concrete (as opposed to notational) form, i.e., the monochrome reliefs that comprise the latest body of work. The concept of Noumenon was introduced by 18th-century German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that things exist separately from our perception of them – a neo-Platonic view that considers “noumena” inherent, imperceptible essences and “phenomena” the forms we think those essences take in life. Thus, the “obstacleist” paintings Ligvani produced earlier cannot embody what they are about, but only point at the fact that such things exist – a concept with which anyone familiar with atomic and sub-atomic physics would be familiar. (And indeed, the earlier paintings often resembled the diagrammatic “maps” made of the paths taken by sub-atomic particles.)
These new works are “phenomenal” rather than “noumenal” in that they operate the way art tends to operate, appealing to the senses with engaging and challenging approximations of Kantian dinge-an-sich (things-in-themselves). Artworks – phenomena – do not misrepresent such things – noumena – so much as point at them and keep us engaged in contemplating them. Again, sub-atomic physics – and, on the other hand, astrophysics – operate like this, in the interstice between what we can see and what we can know as a result. Artworks are what we can know by seeing; the noumena they indicate are what we can “see” by knowing.
Artworks, then, are manifestations of inexactitude, phenomena that invite interpretation in order to narrow (if never really close) the gap between them and noumena. Ligvani’s
Phenomena series at once strains to seal that gap and flourishes in it; their aesthetics, relatively simple to grasp, is one of mystery conveyed with clarity. Not clarity shrouded in mystery, or so it seems: the bright single colors assigned the Phenomena constructions dispel any sense of obscurity, and the clearly and crisply cut folds and tubes, discs and silhouettes that comprise the structures of these works roll in on and over themselves, their variations and repetitions riveting but syncopated and thus stimulating rather than lulling the eye. Ligvani, it seems, wants to keep us alert.
He also wants to keep us aware of natural phenomena. Ligvani has, in fact, derived the structures of his reliefs by engaging a computerized process “simulating the effects of long-term natural and environmental factors on the previously defined code representing obstacles.” The artist’s obstacle theory thus maintains into these new works, no matter how distanced they may be in content and appearance from the earlier paintings. They have been logically derived from the circumstances “illustrated” – or “argued” – by the previous work, but their source, Ligvani’s obstacleism, remains the same.
In an aesthetic context the Phenomena reliefs of Farr Ligvani can be regarded as things in themselves; despite some metaphoric nuance, inevitable with any “concrete” (totally abstract or non-objective) art, they clearly do not represent other things. They embody what Ligvani’s earlier paintings described: form itself as idea itself. But they do so in our perception. They may indicate noumena but, Kant admonishes, they can only be phenomena. They are self-reliant presences, but they are not self-defining, having issued forth from a larger phenomenon, that is, Ligvani’s system of generation. These Phenomena are in effect perceptual markers for imperceptible essences. As such, they mark Ligvani’s transition from the physical and the conceptual to the existential. What these works, these phenomena, seem to be depends on how we (can) see them; what these works, as indicators of noumena, might actually be has nothing to do with us – and are all the more alluring for it.
Los Angeles
April-May 2020