Seventeen Seconds Are Not Enough: The Art of Jered Sprecher at “Three Flights Up”

According to the results of a 2001 study presented to the “International Association of Empirical Aesthetics”, visitors of museums and art galleries on average allot 17 seconds of viewing time to each work on display. While this statistic is cited as evidence of a persistent and pervasive cultural deficiency, the thought of contemplating a painting for almost half a minute may in fact strike many as an appreciable amount of time when contrasted with the speed at which Homepage news headlines, text messages, or “crawling” television bulletins are processed. But it is likely that no curator or artist who identifies him or herself as an heir to the tradition of modern painting would regard these 17-second offerings as anything other than a slight.


But rather than asking who or what (the gallery environment, the works themselves, the viewers, certain critics) is to blame for the fact that paintings today often fail to command our lasting attention, we should first consider what happens (or fails to happen) when someone stands before a work that depicts either an overly familiar object or an incomprehensible “abstraction” whose contemplation seems reserved for members of a secret society. In either instance, what is missing from the aborted “relationship” between work and viewer is any palpable sense of tension, provocation, desire or even curiosity.

While contemporary American society may seem like an inhospitable place for cultivating a certain aesthetic sensibility, Jared Sprecher regards the “culture and crush of images that is in constant flux” as an occasion for issuing a challenge rather than making an accommodation: “confusion can be a powerful thing. [While] it can of course lead the viewer…to move on and disregard the object… [it can also]…lead them to question and search out the meaning…One should be confused when they approach a work of art; if not, if there are no questions, what can be learned?”

How then does Sprecher induce an experience of “productive” confusion that can make 17 seconds of viewing time seem like a blink of an eye rather than some sort of endurance test performed by holding one’s breath for as long as possible? First of all by suspending the distinction between abstract art and representational art: “I am not so interested in a hierarchy of abstraction vs. representation,” Sprecher says.

Because his works inhabit (or in fact carve out) a borderland between those two worlds, viewers of his paintings are initially confronted with indistinct yet suggestively distorted images which seem to solicit patient scrutiny. If Sprecher’s oil paintings invite comparison in this respect with early modernist photographers like Paul Strand who framed strange, unfamiliar shapes in a manner that still allowed traces of the objects’ original, practical purpose to be detected, this is because many of his paintings are in fact modeled after similarly conceived images he captured with his camera while exploring the backstreets of Knoxville. But it is actually misleading to use the term “modeled” in this context, for it is doubtful viewers will actually be able to identify the particular object or image that served as the point of departure for one of Sprecher’s paintings: “one way I arrive at a painting…is to find an image or source that provokes [me]. I think of this as paying homage. An image affects me and I feel I need to try and understand it by painting from it. But often times I veer from the original image…during the act of painting it.”

What is perhaps most striking about Sprecher’s pieces is how this process of transformation which occurs during “the act of painting” can in a sense be reenacted when someone actually views the works. In other words, it would seem Sprecher has made it possible to experience something that the Italian Futurists attempted but failed to bring about nearly 100 years ago in their depictions of humans and animals with multiple limbs: the ability to perceive a two-dimensional painting as a work situated in both space and time.

All three of Sprecher’s works on display at “Three Flights Up” are equipped to empower the imagination of the viewer in this way. For example, the use of several shades of grey that seem to “stain” the linen surface initially appears to divest "The Cave" of a “background.” But upon closer inspection, the work takes on a layered quality as the discernible though blurred contours of several objects emerge underneath small globs of paint and several striated lines. While the shapes seem to congeal into pieces of furniture, they simultaneously recede from our already de-centered view behind a gauze-like material that does not so much form a partition as suffuse the room with a haunting presence. The belated recognition of something that resembles a window then seems to cause the room to expand, but this “opening” also exposes several mysterious circles which hover around the shapes, giving the entire scene the look of a flickering reflection or shadow; the suddenly fragile image now seems to be breaking apart the more tightly we try to hold it in place, as though it were an endangered memory or dream. We have reached a moment where every single point on the surface of the oil painting “counts”—a viewing experience whose value cannot be measured in “seconds.”

“Living Dangerously”: Theatre Knoxville Stages Patrick Hamilton’s “Rope”

“You know how Nietzsche tells us to live dangerously? Well, we thought we would do so—that’s all. We have done so. We have done the thing. Others have talked. We have done.”


As the audience has known since the opening moments of the first Act, the “thing” Brandon (Robert McDonald) is referring to is a “passionless and motiveless” murder. It may seem like quite a stretch for Brandon to brandish Nietzsche’s slogan as a justification for, as director Fran Shea puts it, “killing someone out of boredom” and then celebrating the deed by shoving the corpse into a locked chest that then serves as the buffet table for a dinner party whose guest list includes the victim’s father. But Nietzsche’s half-playful call for artists and writers to “live dangerously” by producing works that take creative risks does accurately describe Shea’s decision to stage Patrick Hamilton’s “Rope.”


“Danger” in fact seems to abound from all sides before the play begins. Consider first of all how Hamilton’s sense of realism seems all but impossible to create when less than 2 level feet separate the outer edge of the 20’ x 22’ stage from the first of about a dozen rows of seats. But no matter where the Theatre Knoxville company held the performance, director and actors would still be confronted with the fact that the style and content of the 1929 script does not seem “dated” merely because of its age.

The commercial success that greeted Hamilton’s play when it opened in London was attributed primarily to the sense of fascinated horror provoked by the depiction of a passionless killer who views himself as consummate artist—a by now all too familiar conceit that seems to subsist as a mildly diverting form of cinematic camp. But perhaps the most formidable problem facing the company is that many in the audience will have already seen the Hitchcock film which was based upon Hamilton’s play. This is bad news because what is most memorable about the 1948 film is that it has a distinctively theatrical quality about it (owing to how Hitchcock creates the impression it was shot entirely in a single take, without any cuts). So it seems unavoidable that the audience will have the film in mind’s eye when they see the play, which puts Shea at an unfair disadvantage since she can hardly match the way Hitchcock captivates viewers by having them see only what he wants them to see and when he wants them to see it.


But it is likely someone who has seen the film will find it hard to become fully engaged in the play for a far more simple reason: the dialogue is, unfortunately, not very good (Hitchcock’s screenwriter Arthur Laurents rewrote every single line). The script is marred above all by the fact that, through no fault of the actors, the comedy of manners orchestrated in the first Act creates an obtrusive atmosphere in which only trace elements of psychological tension can be found. Moreover, Hamilton’s exacting and yet superficial descriptions of each character’s psychological state greatly constrict the actors’ ability to give their performances any degree of shading. Consider the straightjacket Pat Fitch is given to wear as she portrays Leila Arden: “she has no ideas. She also has…a tendency to conceal that deficiency with a show of sophistication…which she brings out with rather comic emphasis, rolling her eyes…as though she doesn’t mean what she is saying.” Shea and Fitch seem to have decided, understandably, that the only way to portray a woman with “no ideas” is to present a caricature of a caricature, which Fitch in fact does so well that she does not leave any space on the stage for any of the other characters to project a sense of pathos—with one notable exception.


The strongest moment of the production occurs after Professor Johnstone Kentley (Joe Jaynes) takes a call from his bed-ridden wife who informs him their son (who lies dead in the chest) has not returned home as expected. His failed, halting attempts to suppress his increasing agitation by hastily chalking it up to an unaccountable bout of irrationality seem suddenly to take us into the heart of a powerful melodrama.
Curiously enough, this pivotal moment of emotional intensity is not stressed as such by Hamilton in any of his detailed directives. But it is identified early on by Brandon who, in his role as the director of the play within the play, explains to his accomplice that “it is he the father, who gives the entire macabre quality of the evening.” Brandon’s “direction” of course falters at the end of the play, as the action slips out of his control and the crime is discovered. But the same could be said about the playwright, because whatever sense of the “macabre” the drama does manage to generate is not nearly powerful enough to give the impassioned condemnation of the murderers that ends the play sufficient moral and aesthetic force.