SPELMAN EVANS DOWNER: LOCATIONS, CONCEPTIONS, SOUNDS
By Peter Frank

Notation is a form of abstraction. More precisely, notations – comprising systems and issuing from and seeking systems --- are abstractions. The non-objective paintings of the 20th century have more than once been mistaken for spy charts, covert signals, and/or encrypted data by overeager government and military-industrial types, and not just in America. The absence of naturally recognizable subjects sets the mind to often anxious interpretation. The oligarchic mind reads one way; the artistic mind reads another. The two reads are not necessarily inimical (although their world views may be). There is mystery and even beauty in such unlikely phenomena as battle maps and economic charts. Art is what emerges when we look between the lines.

The allure notations and notational systems have for the artistic eye thus demonstrably go beyond both the aesthetic and the social – and, as importantly, begin and end there nonetheless. Artists are fascinated by charts and maps, scores and formulas for their calligraphic qualities and equally for the obscure processes by which the information they represent is translated into marks. Such notations seem to choreograph information, removing it from the quotidian and transforming it into exposed, expressed structures, proposals for an architecture of the mind.

By and large, artists, conceptual and otherwise, motivated by notation focus their attention on one given, or invented, system or another. This artist favors historic maps, that one weather data, another scoring for electronic sound composition. Musicians, writers, dancers, and visual artists alike gravitate to the codifications that help them navigate their creative realm(s). Stimulated by an unusually diverse range of notation and notated phenomena, Spelman Evans Downer refuses such self-limitation. Especially in his recent work, Downer explores with equal fervor the visual impact of physical site and aural passage, social trend and historical event. He reflects both on what is being charted and how it is being charted, i.e., the dynamic between subject and language – for that is what notation is, language for measuring and describing non-lingually, and that very function compels Downer to investigate further, to dig deeper into method as well as meaning.

Downer’s concentration on systemic translation of course identifies him as a conceptual artist. But his is a painterly conceptualism, its various examinations undertaken not simply to expose systems but engage them in the concoction and elaboration of rich surfaces, luminous colors, and patterned networks, abstract paintings gratifying (to make and to behold) both because and despite the data they encode. Downer in effect introduces a layer of complex, even idiosyncratic knowledge into a stratification of effects, leaving nothing undelineated and everything darkly and yet giddily beautiful, elegance bearing eloquence.

While Downer’s mapped and charted imagery mirrors and embellishes a priori notational modes – indeed, pre-extant notations drawn from newspapers, meteorological reports, and Google Maps, among myriad other sources, the artist’s musical markings comprise a posteriori his own self-generated forms, resulting from spontaneous reaction(s) to what he is listening to, that is, to what he is feeling and how he is responding both voluntarily and automatically. Here, Downer relies on his own forms -- within a systemic context of spontaneous reaction, perhaps, but uncodified in terms of sound itself or its source. Where documentarians and technicians have been responsible for charting seacoasts and stock indexes, producing graphics upon which Downer expands visually (and texturally), Downer himself is the author of his musical renditions, responsible for the method of depiction, the context of translation across perceptual sensations -- ekphrasis -- and the sonic-somatic reaction itself.

These musical paintings and drawings do not comprise any kind of scoring per se. As opposed to Downer’s maps and charts, reliant on given ideogrammatic structures, his music paintings manifest an unsystematized image – or, better, visual field – that translates energy from other sensate experiences (which we recognize as choreographic as well as aural) into painterly gesture. Here, Downer is less a conceptualst than an abstract expressionist, giving himself over to an entirely subjective formulation of sonic presence. 

If these music paintings are not scores, they are yet notations – exactly the opposite kind(s) of notation from the charts, routes, and regions undergirding Downer’s conceptualist works. Is there any system to Downer’s renditions of music? No, because they are renditions not of the music itself, but of his response to it. Nor are they synesthetic; they are not the result of any automatic cross-conscious experience that generates form or color or texture in parallel with pitch or rhythm or instrumentation. There may be some synesthetic sense-reaction at the core of Downer’s music painting, as there may be in any of ours, but his visual approximations of music are forged with a conscious, even deliberate – if undirected – approach. Theirs is a managed subjectivity, not synesthetic but ekphrastic, a self-aware, knowing, and guided transposition from the received experience of “organized sound” (as composer Edgard Varèse so concisely described music) to the generated experience of organized form.

Perhaps, though, there is some justification in identifying Downer’s map and chart works as ekphrasis as well. In reinterpreting the symbolized data as aesthetic experience, he is quite pointedly aestheticizing the symbolic languages and, more obliquely, the data itself – an ekphrastic project if ever there were one, and here already framed by externalized methods of systematization. Downer interjects himself into his art with color choices, brushstrokes, visual reorientations of source material, and other artistic interventions that ultimately suppress the data-bearing purpose of the codes in favor of their aesthetic presence – and, by extension, the aesthetic presence of the source material itself even in its original, disposable embodiments and sites. These data-languages are ubiquitous, Downer keeps reminding us – ironically enough, by “translating” them into artworks (and traditionally fabricated artworks at that). In these cartographies and infographies Downer conjures art from banal, perhaps abject detail. In his paintings from music, by contrast, he derives art from the transcendent experience of our most abstract art form, making the invisible visible and beginning to reveal what makes music so compelling. “Art is what makes life more interesting than art,” observed French Fluxus artist Robert Fillliou, and the work of Spelman Evans Downer demonstrates how, and why.        

Los Angeles     March 2023