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The Disordered Eye: Bill Armstrong
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 Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1436).
 The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography by Lyle Rexer. Cover by Bill Armstrong. |
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“Now I have to learn the craft of a blind man.” – a friend quoting painter Edgar Degas.
When Edgar Degas enlisted in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he had trouble seeing the rifle targets with his right eye. Over the course of the next decades, Degas eye problems would only get worse. Glare and sunlight bothered him terribly. He saw black spots. Eventually he would need a maid to read to him. He took to making wax figures, partly just to have something he could mold and feel, and not just visualize. Degas fought a creeping blindness for the rest of his life, eventually forced sadly to give up painting in 1912.
Could some of Degas’ best work be because of his blurred vision and creeping blindness, and not just in spite of it?
But the resultant effects of this deteriorating vision on his artistic production we know all too well. Both Degas’ later watercolors and sculptures have an incredible vitality to them. In later years, his strokes loosen, widen, and become more free. There is not the same detail as was in his earlier work, certainly, but there is also a curious, new hazy glow to his figures, as they dance and shimmer in pastel.
 A computer simulation of Degas’ eyesight by Dr. Michael F. Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at
Stanford.
Dr. Michael F. Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford, uses computer simulations to envision what he thinks might have happened to the vision of some of the Impressionists. Monet’s eye problems are of course well known, and so many have speculated that the Impressionists increasing tendencies towards abstraction may have in part due to such optical concerns.
Historical speculation has suggested that Degas suffered from some form of retinal disease or macular degeneration. Interestingly, among other effects, patients with macular disease often tend to choose stronger colours because they perceive a colour’s intensity more weakly. The intense colours used by Degas in his later pictures could therefore be explained – at least in part – by his eye problems.
Perhaps the work of contemporary artist Bill Armstrong is a case in point for the strange, suggestive power of the blur, and for photography’s unique ability to mirror the effects of blindness. For Armstrong’s work makes literal use of the blurred vision we think an artist like Degas was forced to suffer from -and in many cases, possibly also benefit from, adapt to, and overcome.
 Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1408) |
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Bill Armstrong makes photographs from beyond the normal range of vision. In his series Film Noir, he appropriates and re-photographs a range of printed source material at extreme closeup, with his lens set to infinity. Uncertain forms emerge from the result: cloudy, pulsating images of unknown origin and curious narrative. |
 Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1405) |
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Who are these figures? Where do they come from? What are they doing? The pictures never say. The artist never tells us.
Armstrong’s work is a kind of productive confusion: much like as in HBO’s seminal series, The Wire, written by David Simon.
Productive confusion can be used to create a form of narrative complexity where neither exposition nor explanation is ever provided directly to the viewer. Rather, the viewer is encouraged to just go along with the story, without full understanding at first, slowly finding out on his own what local dialects, obscure jargon or subtext eventually means. David Simon’s subsequent show, Treme is perhaps an even better example, for Simon dared to name his new show something very few viewers could even pronounce.
 Actor Clarke Peters as Mardi Gras Indian chief Albert Lambreaux in Treme. |
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WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
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After watching the first episode of Treme, totally confused, I turned to the internet to learn the many local details of New Orleans that make up Treme. And I suddenly realized Simon’s whole point at once. While I could learn the actual facts of the story quickly and easily (and thus make the show a lot more clear), it simply was not nearly as enjoyable as when I didn’t quite know what was going on. That aha! moment, when watching Treme, you first discover on your own what something means, is what the show is really all about. No wonder then, why Simon took so long to finally even show us just what it is those proud, grand Indians really do in those wild rehearsals of theirs. Simon was content rather to let the mystery of their ritual, and its importance and significance, slowly sink in to our consciousness.
So too with Bill Armstrong’s work I think. In their dense, saturated colors and blurred, suggestive forms, we are encouraged to speculate what these shadowy figures are up to, what they might be thinking or feeling. In their heightened opticality they take us on a detour. A detour, that, if seen in the appropriate light, is not one that is confusing, frustrating or haphazard, but on the contrary: productive, meditative, and compelling.
If photography is perhaps then a medium of blindness, maybe we should all be so lucky to see so poorly from time to time. |
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 Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1431). |
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Bill Armstrong is represented by Clampart in New York, Gallery Kayafas in Boston and Hackelbury Fine Art in London, among others. His website is www.billarmstrongphotography.com
Film Noir is at Clampart gallery through April 6th, 2013: 521-531 West 25th Street, New York, NY, between 10th/11th Avenues. |
Tags: abstract photography, Bill Armstrong, blindness, blur, Clampart, David Simon, Edgar Degas, Film Noir, mystery, productive confusion, Rexer, seeing, The Edge of Vision, The Wire, Treme, vision
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