Perry Hall
Material Intelligence
by: Lisa G. Corrin, Class of 1956 Director, Williams College Museum of Art

Paintings, Livepainting Videos, and Sound Drawings

When Jackson Pollock hovered over a canvas on the floor of his studio splattering paint as opposed to stroking it with a paint-imbued brush, the medium underwent a profound transformation. Painting became an index of a process of knowing improvisation by an artist using materials whose behavior he had come to understand intimately. Pollock's process placed into question the definition of the medium of painting-indeed, the very definition of "medium," a contribution that would later be explored by successive generations of artists who tested the uneasy boundaries between painting, drawing, and performance. Likewise, Perry Hall's artistic practice bridges the disciplinary boundaries of art, architecture, film, and technology.

The three bodies of work presented in this, Hall's first museum exhibition-Decalcomania paintings (painted "canvases" and works on paper), Livepaintings (videos of paint in motion), and Sound Drawings (images of sound waves moving through paint)-are unified by his commitment to such disciplinary border crossing. They represent his ongoing investigation of the "material intelligence" of paint: its dynamic nature, continuously evolving and in flux, and informed by living principles.

Hall's adaptation of the decalcomania technique, for example, utilizes the natural, organizational principles of paint. Associated with the German-born Surrealist, Max Ernst, decalcomania involves applying paint to a surface and then placing a piece of glass upon it; the paint is pressurized and organizes into complex networks of raised interlocking lines and ridges, creating an index of the forces imposed by the artist. Ernst looked at the indices of this process and from them generated anthropomorphized images that he considered to be a projection of his unconscious. Hall, however, leaves the results of the process intact without any retouching. His decalcomania objects-some on Masonite, some on x-ray paper-simultaneously resemble landscapes ranging from aerial topographies of human settlements, vast communities of microscopic organisms, palimpsests and maps, or even the mountainous outcroppings depicted in Chinese ink painting. Although they are suggestive of literal geographies, their internal spaces collapse the distinctions between micro- and macrocosms, making the space "represented" difficult to categorize or precisely decipher. The works on paper elude ready identification and suggest reproductive technologies such as etchings, monotypes, or photographs while retaining the surface condition of painting.

The varied taxonomy of the decalcomania works is dependant on forces such as mass, velocity, duration, and the pressure applied to the materials in play. It is this physical action exerted by the artist as well as chance processes already found in nature that impacts the surface, scale, degree of subtlety, and viscosity of the final piece. Such intensive experimentation is a process of trial and error that demands the artist know the capacity of his materials and his own body, while at the same time trusting their mutual ability to react to one another fluidly. The making of the decalcomania paintings might appear to parallel a laboratory experiment in which matter under investigation reveals its own internal properties and laws. However, Hall's experimentation also seeks not only the nature of materials but that of his own subjectivity.

Hall believes that in this process he is, in a sense, "growing" a painting. Indeed, some paintings seem alive with organisms massing, mutating, and dispersing. The complex, nearly transparent meshwork of paint filaments in Untitled #1 (White Decalcomania), (2005) is like the shadowy imprint left by the lace-like, filigree form of a mysterious sea organism. Such poetic beauty is born of paint that is not merely putty in Hall's hand but is matter with its own will with which he collaborates. Untitled #1 (White Decalcomania) is evidence of the interaction between the artist's decision making and the logic of the material. Invariably, this raises questions about Hall's relationship to authorship. Although Pollock saw himself and, by extension, his unconscious as the author of his works, Hall ascribes co-authorship to his material. From Pollock's process came the painted skeins and loops we think of as his inimitable signature. For Hall, the decalcomania process is a collusive one in which the agency of the artist and that of his materials come together to make tactile and visible the isomorphic overlay between the realms of nature and human activity-and of matter itself.

Hall began examining the decalcomania paintings under intense magnification and found terrain that shifted in scale, spaces one could imagine moving through. This led him to create the paintings, soundtrack, and text for Hypnagogue, a pioneering, interactive digital art work. The title references the semi-conscious state between sleeping and waking; this hybrid state also functions as a metaphor for the piece's in-between world, sliding between the realms of painting, architecture, participatory technology, and soundscape. Hall digitized his paintings to make them indeterminate-part digital, part physical-then used digital media to remix these images along with sound, architecture, and text to induce a particular mood or sense of place in each segment. Hypnagogue enabled Hall to bring together the space inside painting, the space inside sound, and the spaces of architecture and landscape that would prove meaningful not only to his studio practice but also to his parallel activities in feature film visual effects.

In 1997, John Gaeta, the filmmaker who would later create the visual effects for the Matrix films, hired Hall to do a series of video studies of the movement of paint in preparation for the animated sequences of What Dreams May Come, starring actor Robin Williams. The movie employed a library of individual brushstrokes which were digitized and then fed into particle system software that created the three-dimensional painted landscapes against which the plot unfolds. During these experimental paint tests were moments when convection cells arose from the chaos of the materials that had been mixed together. Hall realized that when you use paint in real time, unexpected anomalous behavior and stunning physical transformations could occur in the life of paint that could not be improvised through a computer simulation.

From this experience, Hall created his first Livepaintings. Taped in real time and edited without any digital manipulation, this series of "time-based paintings" captures the sensual self-organizing nature of paint as it interacts with a variety of substances and stimuli introduced by the artist including agitation, temperature, chance, and incongruous, even antagonistic materials. The lush, shimmering "moving pictures" capture dynamic natural processes occurring within the paint such as convection cells, vortices, wave-fronts, and agents. Enlarged to near mural scale, the intense visual experience of the projections conjure layers of association: ecstatic journeys into the body, the insistent beating of a churning sea against the shore, the accumulated aggression of pent-up organisms, the pacific calm of the earth regarded from the moon. The titles, Organicity, Abstract Crowd Behavior, Apples/Growth+Decay (inspired by a still life painting by Paul Cézanne), and Orbital Canvas View, to cite just a few, recall the topographies of Hall's decalcomania works.

The Livepaintings connect with the decalcomania works in another fundamental way: They, too, arise from sustained experimentation with uncertain outcome. However, Livepaintings, as their title suggests, come to live and die to be reborn as a projected mediated image. In blurring the boundaries between painting and film-between "medium" and "media," Hall's Livepaintings close the gap between easel painting and technology.

The Livepaintings also serve as a reminder that painting is, fundamentally, a time-based medium, something which Pollock understood well, and which was captured in Hans Namuth's films of Pollock at work. Hall's films also take as their subject the artist's "search for time," to quote the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose work has been significant for Hall. For both the painter and the filmmaker, time is the internal rhythm of the material to which the artist is compelled to respond intuitively and spontaneously, with an abiding respect for the material's individuality, independence, and intelligence.

Making painting through real-time improvisation led Hall to work with improvised sound and use it as the organizing principle for the creation of two works, 1,465 Sound Drawings and Sound Drawings 04-28, 29, and 30. Like the Livepaintings, they rely on the capacity of liquid paint to organize when subjected to stimuli, in this case, sounds from an electric bass.

1,465 Sound Drawings, an ambitious project combining video and works on paper, is based on a 48-second video in which sound waves from an electric bass are channeled through a vessel containing paint. The resulting structures are legible as drawings. (The 48-second video has 30 frames per second resulting in 1,465 different images.) Sound waves create the calligraphic lines and molten forms that are absorbed into a vibrant red field, giving rise to arresting images. Viewers hear throbbing, amplified sound while their eyes are assaulted by the relentless, flickering movements of the video.

Hall chose a group of images from each video Sound Drawing from which to make prints that appear to have been drawn by hand-such as the character of line, the balance of shapes and forms, or a gestural quality, while at the same time retaining their association with the physics of sound. The prints exploit this overlap of drawing and sound, making a puzzle-like Zen Koan: Are the images sound made visible or are they "the visual" made from the material of sound?

The Sound Drawings also explore the experience of synesthesia, in which one sense, such as hearing, is translated into a perception in another sense, such as sight.  For Hall, who began experiencing synesthesia as a child, the perception of one sense through another is real, not imagined. This contradicts the conventional logic that different kinds of perception are separated into discrete areas of the brain. This conviction that all things, including the senses, flow seamlessly into one another serves as an inspiration for works that conflate the optical, aural, and tactile into one unified experience.

If one were to ascribe an ethos to Hall's work, it would be his commitment to keeping painting alive by maintaining its connection to other spheres of knowledge and human activity, a continuum of forces acting upon matter at every level. Jackson Pollock understood that the subjectivity of the painter and the materiality of his medium could be merged. Hall takes Pollock's dictim, "I am nature" to its logical extreme. His practice attempts to become part of nature's elusive systems, anchoring his subjectivity in a rigorous structure in which the body and all of its senses are engaged in the making and experiencing of his art. He does not merely dissolve the bounded definition of painting, but, more profoundly, the boundaries between the metabolism of the maker, the object, and the forces acting upon them. Hall's project extends far beyond the confines of the canvas or the projected image: It proposes a way of being in the world in which complexity is neither calmed nor shuttered, and in which the material of the self is understood, like paint, to be dynamic, continuously evolving, in flux, and informed by living principles that connect everything to everything else.

About the Artist
Perry Hall was raised in Sarasota, Florida and attended Simon's Rock College of Bard, Berklee College of Music, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. His paintings have been featured in exhibitions at the Jamaica Center for the Arts (New York), Artists Space (New York), and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (New York) where he collaborated with the architecture collective, Servo. His interactive digital work, Hypnagogue, was presented at The Kitchen (New York), The American Museum of the Moving Image (New York), the International Symposium on Electronic Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Image/Architettura (Video and Film for Architec-ture) in Florence, Italy, among other venues.

Hall worked as a painter and digital artist on the imaginary landscapes of What Dreams May Come starring Robin Williams that won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and in SonicVision, a music animation at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History (New York). As a composer and performing musician, Hall has traveled nationally with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and he composed the score for Tolstoy's Redemption (The Living Corpse) by Jonathan Schilder-Brown at La Mama (New York). 

Most recently, Hall directed/produced Jackson Pollock: Beneath the Surface, the documentary film created in conjunction with an exhibition of the artist's frieze paintings at the Williams College Museum of Art. Hall has taught digital art and video at Bennington College and participates regularly in studio critiques at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture.

Perry Hall lives and works in Housatonic, Mass.

See more of Hall's art at www.lovebrain.net

The Williams College Museum of Art Media Field Program supports production and presentation of contemporary works using film, video, multi-media installation, and emerging technologies. 

The Director wishes to extend thanks to the following individuals for their contributions to this exhibition: Perry Hall, artist; Tom Branchick, Director, Williamstown Art Conservation Center; WCMA Staff members: Michael Chapman, Diane Hart, Vivian Patterson, Judy Pellerin, Suzanne Silitch, Greg Smith, John Stomberg, Rachel Tassone, Amy Tatro, and Cynthia Way.

The Williams College Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the museum is wheelchair accessible. Contact: Suzanne Augugliaro, Public Relations and External Affairs Director, 413.597.3178.

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