Thomas Macaulay:  Sculptural Views on Perceptual Ambiguity, 1968-1986.

Published by the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. 1986.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 86-61901   ISBN 0-937809-00-4.

Other Texts - Preface: Bruce H. Evans; Introduction: Pamela Houk; Disperspective: Donald Kuspit.
(A copy of the catalog is archived in The Ohioana Library, Columbus.)

Thomas Macaulay – 1968-86.
Betty Collings.

Subsections:   Context;  Landscapes; Early Life and Education; Art Works 1968-1973; Mature Phase; Installations  at Dayton Art Institute in 1986;  Notes.

Context – the Midwestern Arts Milieu 60’s and 70’s.

The purpose of a catalogue essay is to augment the immediately visual aspects of an artist’s work.  In Thomas Macaulay’s case these are (a) the way the inquiries of his mature work parallel similar inquiries in perceptual psychology; (b) the integral relationship between the inspiration for his work and the intellectual environment of the Midwest; and (c) the visual poesy with which he transposes elements of the Midwestern landscape into artful installations.

The thesis that artist, environment, and culture are intricately interrelated is not a new one.  The interconnection of individuals with the human species and between humankind and all natural phenomena is so intimate that works of art have been routinely interpreted in terms of time, place, and event.   Emphasizing the connection between Macaulay’s perceptual sculpture and the visual, sociological, and professional landscapes of the Midwest in the last two decades gives the concept a contemporary and regional interpretation.

The general context for Macaulay’s works can be loosely subdivided into three categories; professional, cultural, and physical.   In particular these categories include conceptual art, an art movement preeminent nationally and internationally in the 60’s and 70’s, the expansion of communications that occurred in the 60’s; and the landscape of the Midwestern United States, especially the areas where he has lived - eastern North Dakota, southern Minnesota, eastern Iowa, and western Ohio.

Conceptual artists do not stress the outward appearance of things.   For them the processes that underlie the natural world, including thought processes, are of paramount interest.   In many cases these concepts are conveyed via installations that encourage interaction between viewer and sculpture.  Such installations stress the importance of a specific or individual viewpoint and emphasize the existence of cultural preconditioning in the mental formulations we call seeing and understanding.   The early conceptual artists drew much of their strength and inspiration from the rapid technological and sociological changes taking place in the 60’s.  One of the most important of these, the revolution in communications, stimulated many conceptual artists to dwell upon the structure of language, upon the fact that language is itself a kind of reality, and upon the transpositional elements in linguistic and visual communication.

The advent of improved communications engendered by the use of computers and satellites is often cited as the cause and means for the concept of global village that arose in the 60’s.  Such new world views undoubtedly affected the interpretation of life for everyone in the Midwest.  Near at hand, the installation of the Interstate Highway System, intended to stimulate interstate travel, encouraged new communities of people who commuted miles each day by car.   In the arts, the newly formed National Endowment for the Arts initiated programs that encouraged artists to make use of the rapidly expanding air and land networks to travel and communicate with one another.

In all professional fields, one result of an expanded outlook and improved communications was an increase in the number and distribution of specialized publications and events.  In art the publications were the nationally distributed glossies such as Artforum, Art News, Art in America, and Arts Magazine and numerous local newsprint magazines like Artweek, Midwest Art, and Dialogue.  Further, artists and art organizations were encouraged to produce unique artists’ books. [1] Together these engendered a new sense that art was a discrete professional field.   Above all there was the sense that it was appropriate to direct one’s art activities toward an audience of educated professionals.  Many concluded that, as a field of study, art was conceptually similar to other professional occupations in that it was sub divisible into areas of special interest.   These no longer conformed to the traditional media-based subdivisions.  Specialists in particular subject areas often found a receptive and informed public in professional associates in other disciplines.   Increasingly alert to the journals of other disciplines, artists were especially interested in articles dealing with perception, linguistics, or structuralism theory.   For short periods and for specific projects, artists teamed up with workers in perceptual psychology, mathematics, computer technology, linguistics and so on. [2]

Before the rapid grown of Ohio Arts Council programs in the 70’s, in Ohio as in all Midwestern plains states, the source of greatest support for artists was the academic system.   In the 60’s and early 70’s, this system was invigorated by new attitudes and burgeoning college enrollments.   Drawing upon a traditional interest in the experimental, [3] university faculty organized symposia, workshops, and exhibitions that were devoted to the study of new forms of contemporary art.  Notable Ohio examples include  “The Relationship of Art Institutions to Contemporary Art” organized by Bert Katz for The Ohio State University College of the Arts in 1973;  “Generative Systems” developed by David Leach for Wright State University in 1979 [4] and the printmakers workshops developed by the Trissolini Gallery at Ohio University, Athens, and Wright State University.

Such programs were supported by the university galleries that undertook the task of bringing outside artists and critics with avant-garde ideas to the Midwest.  In Ohio, examples are Wright State University, the Ohio State University, Ohio University, The University of Akron, and Ohio Wesleyan.   At the same time almost all the departments of art, attempting to provide students with a continuous variety of fresh ideas, replaced regular appointments with visiting artists/faculty that came from all over the United States for periods of several days to a year.   In addition, a number of individual faculty developed and implemented programs that explored the new art forms in depth.  Notable examples include the nationally successful computer graphics program initiated by Charles Csuri at The Ohio State University and the generative systems component of the Chicago School of the Art Institute initiated by Sonia Sheridan.   At about the same time, the accelerated production of writing about art inspired academic programs to include criticism as part of the curriculum.  One of these was developed by Bob Arnold in the Department of Art Education at the Ohio State University.   Working together with the education programs of the Columbus Museum (1975-76) and the University Gallery (1975-79) and financially supported by other art departments and the College of the Arts as well as the National Endowment of the Arts, these programs were able to sustain a challenging series of lectures on criticism.   Interest in this series of critical lectures and those subsequently presented by Ohio Wesleyan at Delaware, Ohio, brought together artists and advanced students from across the central Ohio region. [5.6]

Of particular importance to Macaulay was an accelerating national interest in cross-disciplinary approaches.  In the Midwest this provided the inspiration for programs at Purdue, The Ohio State University, and the University of Iowa.  At Iowa, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the Center for New Performing Arts.   This center, directed by William Hibbard, was designed to encourage and to be the context for artists who could combine various forms of art, such as theatre and sculpture, into integrated works.  While at Iowa, first as a graduate student and then working as a fellow of the center and as a part-time member of the art department, Macaulay was able to develop and present a number of performance pieces.  The theatrical and experiential aspects of these works prefigure his mature phase.  Later, in 1973, he joined the faculty at Wright State University to become part of an accelerating momentum initiated by

Ed Levine, as Chairman of the Department of Art, working closely with Gallery Director, William Spurlock, brought to this new art department a wide variety of artists to both teach and exhibit. The ambitious projects undertaken at Wright State University in the early years included the inaugural gallery exhibition of a temporary site-specific work by Robert Irwin and a permanent outdoor installation by Michael Hall that were the focus of a symposium on sculpture. [7] This lively atmosphere encouraged Macaulay’s spirit of innovation and kept his conceptual bent in focus. Most recently he has presented a number of installations that investigate the illusory and often transient nature of the visual clues that stimulate the brain to interpret perceptual phenomena. 

Appreciation in the form of regional and national fellowships (especially those from the Ohio Arts Council, inclusion in topical group exhibition, catalogue essays, and reviews have helped keep perceptual experimentation a first priority in his work. [8] It is relevant to note here that, with the exception of the Guggenheim Fellowship he received in 1984; all of these opportunities have been created or initiated in the Midwest.

Landscape:
A survey of the issue underlying Macaulay’s most recent work necessarily emphasizes his view that all art is about perception.   However, to summarily categorize it as only about perceptual problems or to see it as semi scientific is to miss its poetic nature and integrative functions.  When one thinks of the look of his work in relation to the look of the landscape that he lives in, one is able to understand that, though this aspect is by and large subconscious, he is in the avant-garde of landscape art.  In his work Macaulay takes the essence of what is seen every day when driving along a Midwestern road—the horizontals, verticals, textures, shifting viewpoints, momentary coherencies, and the spatial ambiguities created by distance an ambient light—and distills, transforms, and re-presents them.  This transcendence of physical likeness is far in advance of the mimetic tools of realistic reproduction.

A description of a winter landscape observed on the short drive from Columbus to Dayton midmorning in late season serves to illustrate this point.  Low white clouds, the kind that from an airplane stretch to the horizon in all directions, shelter the land; the snow cover, already receding into furrows, ditches, and hollows, glimmers from an overnight freeze.  Light, still oblique, rebounds between sky and field, catching on droplets of moisture to fill the air with tangible softness.  Land, road, and sky merge.  The distant grey-blue woodlots and the corduroy soft, tan, stubbled field surface float in an unmeasured space.  Within it, flocks of birds, making circular sweeps, appear to be dots transposing on a screen.

The natural aesthetics of this texturally enlived horizontality include the way in which the occasional cutting or overpass embankment slips back from the road in low angles, determined the he soil’s angle of recline.  Viewed from afar, trees cropped by species and weather form broken lines of uniform height and color.  Not surprisingly, the architecture of human activity—barns, houses, metal structures sheltering new industry—conforms to horizontality and rests snug on the ground, seeking protection from the land itself.

The predominant colors and textures are ice-slick shiny white, new-melt matte white, and a light-laden moisture haze that fills the air up to, through, and beyond the wood lots.   Upon approach, the soft branching halo of the trees, convert to dark, disordered verticals and the ground momentarily displays a mosaic of bark-black, snow-white and lead-brown.  In the valley of the Mad River, flocking birds dot the air above fields of black river loam that, minutely fragmented by freeze and thaw, are stippled with pockets of white.  These fields contrast with those in the plains between the valleys, where winter-softened stubble rests on soils who variegated browns track the water table.

These textures and colors are carried by Macaulay into his installations.  He uses them with the accepted signs, structures, and techniques of art to recreate the experience of momentarily coherency that occurs when a textured field momentarily reveals the order of its plowed furrows, or to recapitulate the illusion of spatial compression that occurs when a barn is silhouetted against the sky.   These effects are achieved by carefully deployed crumpled construction paper, silver paper, masking tape, and push pins as in Installation for DAI: Gallery B. 1986 or through compilations of leaves, bark, t reed trunk and plywood as in Tense (Past/Present/Future), 1980; or with halogen-quartz light, drywall on 2x4’s, paint, and tape, as in House/Open Box, 1979.   These elements are placed so that when walking through the room, recognizable signs—circles, x’s, squares—or structures, such as boxes, houses, or tents, momentarily coalesce.   The way these oversized, culturally recognized signs or structures overlay accumulations of texture and object flattens space and momentarily fools the eye into accepting a fallacy.  Within these artfully devised interactive environments, the visitor subconsciously recalls and intuitively grasps the symbiosis of past and present, physical and mental experience.

Early life and education:

Macaulay’s involvement with art from the independent experimentation in his early teens until the present exemplifies an artist’s use of all the aspects of the environment to construct a personal world model strong enough to underscore a viable lifestyle.  Art comes naturally to him.  When he was young, his father—a physician practicing Fargo, North Dakota—occasionally painted.   The family took regular vacations in the Minnesota lake region and almost yearly traveled out of the Midwest. There were visits to art museums.  This environment provided the home studio within which, as a teenager, he invested compilations of found objects with emotional content.  His family encouraged him to enroll at Saint Olaf College if Northfield, Minnesota, in preparation for an architecture degree but understood his subsequent turn to sculpture.   Arnold Flaten taught sculpture at Saint Olaf and worked from a Henry Moore-like tradition that stressed “truth to materials.”  For sculptors, this internationally adopted attitude was a direct precursor to the process and procedural techniques of minimal, conceptual, even structuralist art.   Of this period, Macaulay says that the fact of the matter was that he “wasn’t much good at anything except art.”[9]   Even at this early stage of his career, he viewed as a vehicle for personal development and communication.  He has never seen the validity of making static and permanent objects.

Macaulay entered graduate school at the University of Iowa in sculpture but quickly moved into multimedia.  The studio for this study area was located at Corralville, far from the traditional arts complex in Iowa City.  Its founder, Hans Breder, was instrumental in bringing innovators such as Robert Wilson, Scott Kaprow, Hans Haacke, and even Alan Kaprow to create works and interact with the students. After graduation, Macaulay taught multimedia in the School of Art and continued as a Visual Art Fellow in the Center for New Performing Arts.   Another member of the center was Chris Parker, a painter and filmmaker.  He had transferred to art after completing degrees in English and brought to the center an emphasis upon metaphorical overlay that had a significant impact upon Macaulay.  So did the happenings of Alan Kaprow.  It is interesting to note that, although inspired and challenged by the idea that the point of an art work could be to stimulate interactive behavior, Macaulay’s reaction to the manipulative aspects of a Kaprow happening was to create situations in which the participants proceeded independently. That the participants exercise personal integrity has remained an important aspect of Macaulay’s art.

Art works  1968 – 1973

Within the early works made between 1968 and 1973, there is evidence of all the principal ideas that culminate in the perceptual and philosophical concerns and the visual techniques that lie behind Macaulay’s mature work.  These include the interaction of two systems (usually order and disorder) the necessity of self-directed viewer participation, the use of accepted systems of signs, multiple meanings, visual/verbal puns, theatricality, the construction  and devolution of illusion, metaphors for philosophical ideas and concepts such as relativity, and the idea that perceptions of reality are made in the mind.

Brass Box, 1968 and Copper Cube, 1968, made at Iowa while he was still in the sculpture department, are gridded structures holding semi-random elements.  They show an early fascination with the interplay of two systems.  The juxtaposition of order with disorder is a technique basic to all the later perceptual environments.

Ball Box, 1969 and Breathing Box, 1969 contain variants on the concept of viewer interaction.  In Ball Box the viewer, who looks past the grid of balls to the interior of the sculpture, is disoriented by a mirror image of the surrounding room that has been split by the intersection of the interior surfaces.  Ball Box and Brass Box may be turned over by the viewer.  In Breathing Box the involuntary symbiosis of object and perceiver is amusingly emphasized as the regular pulsing of air in the inflated tubes co-opts the viewer into breathing in unison with it.

Flesh Vendor, 1969 and Pair/paired pair/pared 1972, Still Life, 1972 and Breadboard, 1972, all amusing pairs of words, images, and objects, show his interest in language structures and his fascination with the possibilities for multiple meaning.

Medicine Chest, 1969, Phantom Truck, 1971, and Landing, 1972 are theatrical. [10] Phantom Truck, a site specific installation, is an example of the way Macaulay uses elements of everyday experience.  It was an outdoor piece to be seen at night, consisting of a scaffold upon which he mounted an array of lights that simulated the appearance of a jack-knifed, oversized trailer truck.   The overwhelming visual effect of this theatrical façade was heightened by the sound of engine idling, warning lights flashing, and headlights alternating between high and low beam.  This phantom object was placed sot that viewers were encouraged to walk up to and through it.  To do so revealed a façade and showed the viewer all the elements that contributed to it power.   This devolution of illusion became an integral part of the later perceptual installations. Macaulay’s purpose is not to use visual tricks to create and maintain illusions.  He makes an illusion the focus of a didactic installation.  In this case he demonstrated how past experience informs expectations and causes the mind to perceive what is not.   The power of this kind of false inference is demonstrated in Landing, 1972, another night work.  In it, a benign avenue of flares, through which visitors to the outdoor exhibition strolled, becomes a site of terror when an overhead airplane was perceived to be preparing to land.

Most of these works contain metaphorical elements, but metaphor is most apparent in the video performance TOP/BOTTOM/LEFT/RIGHT, 1972.  This work was about the mystery and conceptual complexity inherent in spatial relatively.  The first ten minutes consisted of the artist, as performer, making a straightforward presentation of the permutations involved in the display of four double-faced signs.  On one side these read TOP, BOTTOM, LEFT AND RIGHT.   On the other side they are completely reversed, that is, mirror images of the front.  Pushpins were used to sequentially rotate or flip the frontwards or backwards directional works within a square format on the wall.  In movements I and II the spatial possibilities were further convoluted because the video camera photographs not the performance but its mirror image.   In movements I and III another convolution was introduced by turning the camera upside down.  Thus the monitor presented a sequence of spatially manipulated images.  Each movement ended with the video monitor showing correct labeling, while the wall (or performance) in movements   I, II, and III was actually “incorrect.”  The remaining two-thirds of the work is yet another permutation of the first third.  The first playback was possible because reel-to-reel equipment was used [11[Before this ten-minute playback, the specially altered reels were flipped top to bottom, thus turned left to right.  What followed was a soundless image, back-to-front in time, with images reversed top/bottom, left/right.   In the second play-back, the image and sequence are those initially displayed by the monitor and now existing as a compete entity distinct from the original performance.  

Watching the development of this initially comprehensible proposition, one quickly learns that the mind, unable to keep more than two or three bits of information up front at one time, is further confounded when the clues are linked in accordance with spatially relative (that is, groundless) parameters.   As the performance progresses, comprehension dissolves.  What is stressed is the impossibility of comprehending all aspects, elements, and attitudes at one time.  The mind cannot hold so much, and a logically conceived exercise in spatial relationships dissipates into a metaphor for incomprehensibility of the infinite.  Although very different in appearance, the technique is nevertheless comparable to the use of pattern in Islamic Art or the labyrinth of a Mandela.  One presumes that Leonardo ad Vinci, who practiced mirror writing, would have loved it.

The idea that there are no absolutes and that the apparently simple is capable of great complexity are further expressed in Camouflaged (Disguised/Concealed) 1976, another apparently rationally conceived, logical progression.   At first glance the constants in the piece appear to be eleven 4’x4’ plywood units, each with three circular holes. Each set of holes seems to be matched by three loose disks attached to the boards by ropes of constant length.  A quick assessment of the eleven units indicates an easily comprehended procedural work.   This follows a sequence in which the disks, at first stacked above the board, are lowered one by one, and then are left hanging free while the board is rotated 180 degrees.  Finally the disks are placed in the holes.  However, the last frame of this stop-frame sequence does not quite conform to this concept on first take; its apparent aberrance requires to viewer to come close and review the total situation.  To do so is to be shown that the artist has played with the mind’s capacity to make assessments from limited clues.   There are many illusions.  In fact, the flexible ropes are rigid wire, the 4’ x 4’ boards are composites of carefully matched irregular sections.   The apparently casually rendered roller paint stripes are a carefully executed form of tromp l’oeil that capitalizes on the light and dark striations in wood grain.   There are not overlaps; all the images except the “ropes” are on one plane.  Each disk is a composite of two sections, the sections made visible by the grain of the wood.   The seemingly casual gross order of stacking and replacing disks turns out to be an exacting placement determined by the wood grain.  This functions as a clue to the illusory aspects of the piece.   Reviewing the work in Toto, one is newly conscious of the need to look beyond the obvious.  Once again there is an analogy in nature.  Upon examination, the natural effects of a landscape (via the signs of its own making) reveal detailed information about soil, weather, use and age.

Portable Fall, an unfinished work, 1973 - , first installed at Wright State University in 1973 and adapted for a variety of locations in ’75, ’76, ’78, ’79  and again in ’86 shows the close connection between Macaulay’s daily life and his thoughts as expressed in art.  The materials for these works are gathered from the two acres of trees that surround the house in which he lives with his son, Ian, and his wife, Ardis, who is also an artist.  One of these trees is thought to be over 300 years old and many are older than 100 years.   Informed by personal philosophies molded in the ‘60’s, the Macaulays’ prefer to allow this woods, near New Carlisle, Ohio, to follow a natural cycle of birth and decay.  Sometimes, however, interrupting this process is necessary because of disease and damage.  When it is Macaulay sorts, stacks and stores trees and bark as well as leaves for future projects.  In this way the successive installations of Portable Fall have become a metaphor for the repetition and renewal of the seasons.   The 1973 installation of Portable Fall  is of additional significance, since it appears to mark the beginning of Macaulay’s mature phase.

Mature phase –

From 1973 to the present, while retaining the more general philosophical concerns of the early works, he has gradually shifted emphasis.  His work, now primarily concerned with mental processing, centers around his interest in “things that are three dimensional but appear to be two dimensional.” [12]

A heightened interest in the way we perceive, interpret, and represent phenomena is the basis of all experimental art.  Historical evidence of this includes the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and the illusion of three- dimensionality in the paintings of Rembrandt.  These days, some artists use the activity of art making as the workshop in which perceptual questions are the subject and art is the medium.  Of these artists, Macaulay is one of several who direct attention to the perceptual issues directly related to the visual language. [13]   This revival of artistic interest in perceptual problems once again demonstrates the subtle integration of art and cultural attitudes.  Due principally to the communications revolution, the entire culture has come to realize that understanding how we think is as important to species survival as environmental management.   The most concrete evidence of the widespread interest in mental processing occurred in the 1970s with the formation of the discipline of cognitive science.  This new field of study includes those aspects of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, computer technology, and psychology that study the mind.  That it does not include art may be simply because, in the end, the traditional cultural definition of art requires the artist to proceed personally and independently.   Alternatively, it may be a function of the fact that cognitive science, by accepting the emphasis upon quantification that underlies the definition of scientific rigor, has automatically excluded art.    Artistic conclusi9ons as well as other forms of intuitive reasoning depend upon a widely spread, fleeting, tangential, often sensory, information base. [14] Placing the traditional view of art as an outgrowth, function, or expression of culture alongside the accepted forms of scientific analysis makes it very easy to exclude art ideas from avant-garde ideas.   However, in this century, developments in fields as diverse as animal behavior, zoology, anthropology, psycholinguistics, and particle physics have shown that a vital area of contemporary investigation is the way widespread bits of information become or are integrated into conceptual wholes.  In the word of Michael Kubovy, “Artists are like psychologists, because they systematically explore ways of inducing experiences in us.   Artists are like avant-garde psychologists to the extent that the experiences they induce are new and cannot be explained by current psychological theory.” [15]

It would appear that Macaulay’s ideas about seeing are very close to those of the experimental and theoretical transactional psychologists who investigate the ways people structure their own visual world. {16] Macaulay is especially interested in the way that familiar signs, unique to each person, become encoded into a condensed interpretive structure that is used as a first resource when looking at new situations. His basic premise is that eye/mind, prematurely responsive to limited clues, can be fooled.   In the installations he has completed over the last decade, his most persistent technique has been to lay two dimensional constructs over three-dimensional physicality and then to motivate the viewer to participate in the deconstruction of the illusion thus created.  In order to construct these works, he draws upon some of the well recognized ways of creating spatial illusions. [12] These include the manipulation of light, shade, intensity and direction, mathematical perspective, and double images.

Installation for DAI: Gallery B, 1986 and Tense (Past/Present/Future), 1980 have focal points from which the viewer is persuaded that certain three dimensional realities exist –that there is a field of tents, for instance.   In Tense (Past/Present/Future, however, to walk away from the optimum viewpoint is to discover that the tents are facades.  They conceal an all-over distribution of natural elements with which they are fully integrated.  Triangle(s), 1975, is an early example of this point of view concept. constructed so a three-dimensional array of pyramids, when viewed head on, takes on the appearance of a striped plane.

Open Box Type (Red), 1977; Open Box Type (Gold), 1978 and Open Box Type (Yellow Complex), 1978, make use of culturally familiar renditions of a cube.   In these works Macaulay, using his knowledge of Renaissance perspective, devised three-dimensional facades that were placed and lit so that, from certain vantage points, they appeared to be complete objects.  His expressed intention was to make the object become an illusion.  In particular the w ay in which Open Box Type (Yellow Complex) was installed stressed Macaulay’s didactic purpose.  Ensuring that the viewer understands the illusion is a fundamental aspect of all Macaulay’s work but, in this work, dramatic lighting emphasizes that the viewer must walk around the whole installation to the get the point.

The theoretical use of light was repeated in the exhibition “Illusions” at the Herron School of Art Gallery in 1980.  Macaulay’s installation channeled the viewer into a narrow aisle, the visual focus of which appeared to be a luminous cross situated at the end of an elongated tunnel-shaped window.  The viewer walked up the aisle to the proscenium of the tunnel, then exited out one or the other side to find the “image” was in truth, a sheet of photographic backdrop paper illuminated by 15-watt bulbs.   From the aisle, the straight-on-view of this paper sheet was transformed into the image of a cross by baffles placed in the corners of the tunnel.  Further, the fine lines that formed a cross within the “cross” turned out to be ropes stretched across the space in such a way that at, and only at, the plane of the image, they appeared to cross at right angles.

The visual power of commonly understood cultural signs is the premise that underlies all the recent installations presented from 1980-1985.  In them, Macaulay uses two basic techniques.  The first is to flatten space by superimposing a geometric sign, such as a circle, square, of x over a three-dimensional space, that is, the corner of a room.   The second is to sue what appears to be Renaissance perspective to create the appearance of receding space on a two-dimensional wall.  Here, Macaulay’s method for creating this illusion of spatial depth again uses corners and always simulates the reflection of a mirror image. One particularly effective use of these techniques was the installation at the Ohio Foundation on the Arts Gallery in 1983. [18] Here, even though all the tricks of the illusion were laid out before the viewer reached the climactic points, the participants still felt as if they were “floating in a nether world between two- and three-dimensional realities.” [19]

In point of fact, in setting up these installations Macaulay defines the image and checks the illusion by using a camera lens rather than by employing techniques of mathematical perspective.   He has found that the camera lens is more discriminating than the eye.  This is due to the exclusion of binocular vision.   As the artist notes, “.two eyes, constantly in motion, gather a wide variety of spatial information.” [20]

The most recent of Macaulay’s works are those installed for this exhibition –Installation for DAI: Gallery B, 1986 and Installation for DAI: Window Gallery, 1986. These works show a broadening of the conceptual basis for his experimental approach.  In them, he makes a play on a fundamental difference between the oriental and occidental depictions of space.  Beginning with the Renaissance, perspectival diminishment became a commonly used convention for the description of space in Western art.  In the East, in contrast, space is depicted as experienced, that is of equal dimension in all directions.  The artist’s notes on these installations read as follows:

Installation for DAI: Gallery B.
 Materials: Wrinkled paper—black, silver; pushpins—black, clear; tape—black.
 Issue: Describing an occidental perceptual approach (physicality of thing), using an oriental method of depiction (isometric perspective basis).

Description:  A well-lit, static, distant object which locks the viewer on a singular image that is in conflict with the ground (the corner of the gallery).
Viewing: The image point of view is located at the exit doorway of Gallery B, through which viewers reenter the gallery after passing through the Window Gallery.   Although the viewer passes this work after first entering Gallery B, it is only upon re-entering that the materials coalesce into an image.

Installation for DAI: Window Gallery.
Materials:  Wrinkled paper—black, silver, white;
Platforms—grey, pushpins—black, clear, white; tape—black, white.

Issue:  Describing an oriental perceptual approach (spirituality of place), using an occidental method of depiction (single point perspective basis).

Description: A semi-dark, shifting, close environment which holds the viewer through plural spatial readings that are in conflict with one another (including the corners of the gallery.)

Viewing:  The image point of view is located at the doorway to the Window Gallery.   As the viewer moves through the gallery toward the exit the image disintegrates into materials.

This is an extremely succinct statement of intent and accomplishment.  Nevertheless, in the final analysis the overall effect of Macaulay’s work remains poetic and projects optimism. The conceptual emphasis and noncommercial form of his expressive output can be, in large part, attributed to the quality and variety of discussion encouraged by the nonprofit networks of the Midwest.  In particular, the solid financial foundation provided by the academic system gives Macaulay the freedom to make a contribution to the national discourse within the now-traditional terms of the avant-garde.

Betty Collings, artist, curator, writer, Columbus, Ohio.   1986.

1. Notes:
   Examples include: Thomas Macaulay. Ed. Volume I and II (Iowa City: the Center for New and Performing Arts, University of Iowa, 1972).
2. Maurice Tuchman and Jane Livingston, Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967-71. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971.)
3. Hoyt Sherman, The Visual Demonstration Centre, (Columbus, The Institute for Research and Vision, The Ohio State University, 1951.)
4. David Leach, “Generative Issues—A Common Ground,” Dialogue, November/December, 1979. pp. 47-49.
5. Critics and writers brought to Ohio State between 1975-79 included Lawrence Alloway, Rosalind Krauss, Hilton Kramer, Donald Kuspit, Robert Pincus-Witten, Leo Steinberg, and Marcia Tucker.
6. The Ohio Wesleyan speaker series has included Larry Fink, H.W. Janson, April Kingsley, Hilton Kramer, Beaumont Newhall, Connie Robins, and Marcia Tucker.
7. Artists who visited Wright State University between 1974 and 1978 included Vito Acconci, Stephen Antonakas, Siah Armajani, Michael Hall, Patrick Ireland, Robert Irwin, Barry LeVa, and Dennis Oppenheim. In each case, Ed Levine or Bill Spurlock, inspired by a philosophical point of view but constrained by budgetary realities, commissioned an installation for the Wright State Gallery program.  Most of these were impermanent.
8. Exhibitions –
    Donald Brewer, Reality of Illusion, exhibition catalogue (American Art Review Press, Quaker Hill, Connecticut, 1979.)
   
   Betty Collings, et al. “Aspects of Perception: Art and Cognitive Science” exhibition catalogue (Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, 1983).
   
   Michael Jones, “Introduction” to Thomas Macaulay/1983 Works, exhibition catalog (The Plains Art Museum, Moorhead, Minnesota. 1984.)
   
   Betty Collings, “Minding Measure, Measuring Mind, exhibition Posterlog. (Islip Museum, East Islip, New York. 1984.
   
   Reviews –
   William Wilson, “Realism: All in the “I” of the Beholder.”  Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1979.
   Donn Frey, “Illusions Fool the Eye,” The Indianapolis Star, July 20, 1980.
   Helen A Harrison, “Trying to Bridge the Gap Between Seeing an Knowing” New York Times, February 5, 1984.
   
   Fellowships:
   National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Arts Council Regional Fellowship, 1978.
   Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, 1982-83 and 1985-86.
   John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1984.
   Institute for Art and Urban Resources and Ohio Arts Council, New York Residency Fellowship, 1985
9. Taped interview between Macaulay and the author, February, 1986.
10. Phantom Truck, 1971, and Landing, 1972 were shown in the Dayton Art Institute exhibition as photo documentation.
11. In the DAI exhibition only the second playback was shown.
12. Macaulay interviewed by Donn Fry for The Indianapolis Star, July 20, 1980
13. Betty Collings, “Aspects of Perception” p. 3.
14. Brewster Giselin, ed.  “The Creative Process” with writings by Albert Einstein, Vincent van Gogh, Fredrich Nietzche, Carl Gustav Jung, A.E. Housman, Henry Moore, Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, and others.  (Berkeley University of C alifornia Press, 1985.)
15. Betty Collings, “Aspects of Perception”
    Barbara Haskell, ed.  “James Turrell; Light and Space”. Exhibition catalog (Whitney Museum of Art, New York, 1980.)
    
    Lawrence Weschler, “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees:  A Life of Contemporary Artist, Robert Irwin” (Berkeley University of California Press, 1982.)
16. Edward T. Hall “The Hidden Dimension”. New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1966)
17. Mathew Luckiesh, “Visual Illusions”  Mineola, New York, Dover, 1965) pp. 35-36
18. More complete documentation in the form of sixteen photographs can be found in “Portfolio,” Dialogue, Vol5. No.5. May/June, 1983, p. 50-51.
19. Michael Jones, “Macaulay’s X” Dialogue, Vol 5 No. 5. May/June, 1983, p. 13.
20. Taped interview between the author and Macaulay, February, 1986.