Patrick Nagatani: Chromatherapy

Penhall notes though, that the works begun in 1978 would “take on a new and very personal dimension for him years later.”13 The artist has talked frankly about his battle with cancer. Some of the photographs in Chromatherapy hint at the cold objectivity and the invasive nature of western medicine. See for example ESOTERIC SCIENCE - SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORY, NEW MEXICO 200414, POST ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY CHROMO REHABILITATION 2004, or his startling self-portrait, RYOICHI AND SID - ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO 2005. The presence, even in these images, of the enveloping color, however, softens them. Critic Theresa Bembnister writes, “The hue-saturated medical environments provide a stark contrast to the white coats and walls of hospitals and clinics.”15

LORNA - CHROMO COSMETICS - WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA 1978/2004 (Chromatherapy series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

and the inability of language to express what is seen: “The idea that colour is beyond, beneath or in some other way at the limit of language has been expressed in a number of ways by a number of writers.”8 Nagatani’s images also deny language, or at least act as a different kind of language.

In TRANSMISSION 1980/2004 a bloated hand floats in a spectrum of colored lights. Sign language charts float in the center of the image. Once again, the image cannot be read in any logical narrative manner, yet the component parts suggest alternative modes of making meaning. A parallel can be drawn, once again, to Spielberg’s film. At the climax of the film, two worlds communicate – the world of the scientists’ laboratory at the top of Devil’s Tower and the world of the alien mother-ship. Without language, color becomes the alternate code in which to express ideas. The colored lights and sounds, made by the space ship and its inhabitants, are translated into patterns and meaning, and eventually transport the main character to a different world.

In a third part of his thesis Batchelor argues that color is suspect, in part, because it is “relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic.”9 To Plato, the painter was but a dyer, producing a “deceitful kosmètikè,” a superficial cosmetic layer atop 8 Batchelor, 81 9 Batchelor, 22-23

a surface – a layer not really there, a layer unable to penetrate in a meaningful way.10 This cosmetic superficiality, nevertheless, could be seductive and dangerous rhetoric. To Babbitt’s and to Dinshah’s critics, this superficiality might lure the naïve and desperate patient with false hopes.

Nagatani’s photographs recognize this aspect of cosmetic superficiality (one image is titled LORNA – CHROMO COSMETICS – WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA 1978/2004) and he has called his images “charades.”11 Yet, an aspect of color theory resonates deeply in Nagatani’s work. “The substance’s placed within the colored lenses, and charged by sunlight become medicated with an exquisite principle which is more gentle, enduring and far reaching in its effect than ordinary drugs” wrote Babbitt.12 The use of the word “gentle” is germane to Nagatani’s practice.

13 Penhall, 146 14 This image certainly relates to Nagatani’s long-standing interest in the nuclear history of his adopted state.

15 Bembnister, “If I were a Chromatherapist…,” Kansas City Star, January 25, 2007.

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n the preface to Babbitt’s text, one 19th-century contemporary noted the need for a new type of therapeutics “light, air, water…food and food-medicines, in place of crude drugs, blisterings, burnings, setons, relics of barbarism.”16 Nagatani, reflecting on his imaginary images, writes “The idea of colored light as a non-invasive medical treatment, light over the body rather than the cutting into the body or the ingestion of drugs within the body might be a dream rather than reality, but perhaps some dreams should be reality.”17 Nagatani believed that he had completed his series in 2007. Yet in 2014 he returned to Chromatherapy, making an image of “the way you wish it would be”18 In CHEMO/CHROMO – RYOICHI AT HOA (HEMATOLOGY/ONCOLOGY ASSOCIATES, ALBUQUERQUE, NM 2014-15 the artist turns the table and takes control, and the chemotherapy setting is augmented by joyful chromohealing, lovingly delivered by three young and beautiful nurses who administer a red colored light.

CHEMO/CHROMO – RYOICHI AT HOA (HEMATOLOGY/ONCOLOGY ASSOCIATES, ALBUQUERQUE, NM 2014/15 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

16 Babbitt, viii 17 Nagatani, website, http://www.patricknagatani.com/ 18 Personal communication, March 2015

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hile we might question the promises of alternative medical forms, we don’t question that light, and its component parts of color, are crucial to our survival. The transformation that we feel sitting beneath the stained glass windows of St. Chapelle or Chartres, is real, even if we have the inability to quantify that transformation with precise or scientific accuracy or with words. Nagatani tells us that art -- art that allows us to dream, art that allows for fiction, art that takes us to transcendent places through color -- is likewise essential.

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t stands to reason that a series ranging in date from 1978 to 2015 would reflect different concerns. A group of images focused on plant and animal subjects, for example, reflect bioethical debates on transgenic bioengineering that became prominent in artistic discourse at the turn of the 21st century.

10 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, University of California Press, 1993),42 11 Penhall, 146 12 Babbitt, 95

CRITIC & ARTIST RESIDENCY SERIES

POST ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY CHROMO REHABILITATION 2004 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

Acknowledgements: The Gregory Allicar Museum of Art is very grateful to the artist, Patrick Nagatani, for his kindness. The exhibition of Nagatani’s work and this publication are presented as part of the museum’s ongoing Critic and Artist Residency Series, supported by the FUNd Endowment at CSU.

Cover Image: MARCUS - INSTANT CULTURAL VISION - CHROMATIC OPTOMETRY LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 1978/2004 (Chromatherapy series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

PATRICK NAGATANI CHROMATHERAPY SEPT 10 - DEC 16, 2016

a high-watt bulb fitted with colored filters. In the majority of Nagatani’s photographs, the light is applied by means of a simple object -- a photographic lamp, placed prominently in the image. The lamps make us, as viewers, more aware of the staged nature of the imagery, but they also recall the tools that Dinshah, and his followers, used and marketed.

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he fifty-plus photographs in Patrick Nagatani’s Chromatherapy Project (1978 - ongoing) are all staged – fictions played out with actors, sets, and props – the stuff of theatre and cinema. Michele Penhall, in her exhaustive study of the artist’s work, notes that the series confounds.1 There is no logical narrative, no repeating cast of characters, nor a unifying setting. Subjects range from single figures to large ensembles, as well as to species from the animal and vegetable worlds. Similarly the photographs fail to elicit a single emotive response. The images can be funny, dizzying, beautiful. Viewers report being enthralled, confused, queasy.

Any easy or encompassing analysis of the work is denied. Nagatani treads, I would argue, on an ambiguous tightrope, blurring boundaries between fiction and fact, and questioning the decisive dichotomy that westernthought brings to these binaries.

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1 Michele M. Penhall, “Heal Thy Self,” in Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani 1978-2008, ed. Michelle M. Penhall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2010), 146-148.

TAP WATER, DISTILLED H20, VODKA - ABSORBING CHROMA RAYS 2004 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

W TRANSMISSION 1980/2004 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

SCIENCE/FICTION:

THE AMBIGUITY OF COLOR IN PATRICK NAGATANI’S CHROMATHERAPY PROJECT

by Linny Frickman

hat unites Chromatherapy are persistent clues that make the photographs’ constructed nature – their filmic quality – evident. Even the landscape orientation of the photographs recalls a cinematic screen. A voracious reader and writer of fiction, the artist loves fantasy, both as expressed on the written page and in film. In a close, if brief, encounter with Hollywood’s filmmaking industry, Nagatani worked and observed on the sets of Blade Runner and Steven Spielberg’s classic science-fiction epic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.2 Although the encounter was brief, Nagatani notes that the impact was life-long.

“Greg Jein (head model builder for all those movies then) would let me check out the films he was working on and taught me force field perspective...it was observing and learning tricks for the lenticular point of view as well as the idea of created ‘reality,’ suspension of disbelief, and working with different materials that influenced me…”3 In the created reality of Close Encounters, the lead character Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfus, escapes the blandness of routine life on earth for a multi-colored alter-reality, the fantasia of the UFO’s colored lights. The subjects in Nagatani’s

images experience similar physical and psychological alterations through chromatic exposure.

The Chromatherapy Project derives from the artist’s study and deep interest in alternative medical systems of color-healing. Beliefs in the use of color for healing purposes date to the ancient world and various cultures, but interest in the United States begins in the 19th century, when several practitioners expounded theories. In 1878 Edwin D. Babbitt published The Principals of Light and Color in which he describes a materia medica, or “a standard of medical practice” using “the vegetable world, water, air, electricity, and magnetism, and the still finer forces of sunlight” to treat a whole host of medical and psychological conditions.4 Alternately seen as redeemer or quack, innovator or charlatan, Babbitt set out to find a comprehensive system for treating the body through the use of color.

This could take the form of ingesting or applying minerals or plants rich in particular chromatic content, or most potently through the use of colored light. In 1920 Dinshah Pestanji Ghadiali, known simply as Dinshah, created another method of colored light

therapy, establishing a school and training course that is estimated to have been practiced by over ten thousand followers.5 Like Babbitt, Dinshah was condemned by the scientific establishment (the American Medical Association specifically) and eventually found guilty of fraudulent treatment of patients and perpetrating a fiction. Nagatani explores this history in Chromatherapy. In meticulously composed and printed images he gives us complex, layered, irrational, and often confusing scenarios, all concerned with color as healing agent. He seems neither to solely condemn these ideas as hoax, nor embrace them as panacea. Some plates read as blatant satire, others as credible situations, others combine elements of artifice with visceral fact. He pictures scars, bloated limbs, deformed toes, and most prominently a self-portrait with stoma, speaking clearly to the fragility and mortal state of the human body while at the same time bathing the body in beautiful spectrums of color.

Because the scenes send ambiguous messages they reflect

2 Penhall, 147.

3 Patrick Nagatani, e-mail message to the author, May, 26, 2016.

4 Edwin D. Babbitt, The Principles of Light and Color, edited and annotated by Faber Birren (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1967), 17.

5 Matthew Lavine, “The Science of Automatic Precision,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44 (2014); 140.

ow does Nagatani’s choice of color as theme relate to his love of fiction, and to the unstable meanings of the photographs? The healers claimed that color at the proper wave-length could take the place of pharmaceuticals to cure our ailments. In the ancient world color was also likened to a drug – not a positive agent for health, but a deceptive and dangerous placebo.

Contemporary artist and writer David Batchelor notes, “There is an interesting relationship between drugs and colour, and it is not a recent invention. Rather it goes back to Antiquity, to Aristotle, who called colour a drug – pharmakon

– and, before that, to the iconoclast Plato, for whom a painter was merely ‘a grinder and mixer of multi-colour drugs’.”6 In his text, Chromophobia, Batchelor explores the idea of color-as-drug, and color as a marker of the irrational and fictitious.

He demonstrates how a drugged state is often represented, in literature, film, and art, as a “descent into color,” a dangerous intoxication, a flight from reality, a dream.7 Color is suspect in western culture, a fall from reason. Nagatani’s choice of color as theme is fascinating in this regard. His use of color engages with notions of fantasy, both in terms of the constructed nature of the photographs, and in picturing alternatives to western rationalism.

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atchelor develops his argument further, noting that color is problematic in the West due to its elusive nature

6 David Batchelor, Chromophobia, (London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2000), 31.

7 Batchelor, 31-34

on and question a deep-seated unease with irrationality, with fiction versus scientific fact, that pervades much western discourse and that dominated debates about color therapy’s place as valid or fraudulent medical option.

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s a color healer, Babbitt found certain therapeutic methods more effective than others; primary was the use of colored light and the ingestion of liquids charged with light. Nagatani playfully references this practice in TAPWATER, DISTILLED H2O, VODKA – ABSORBING CHROMA RAYS 2004 and TONATION IN COLOR CHARGED H2O 2004.

Babbitt’s Chromolume, stained glass in a wooden armature, Chromo-disc, a tool for concentrating a specific color on a particular part of the body (similar to the Nagatani’s coneshaped object in ILLUMINATION - PRELUDE TO DHARMAKAYA LIGHT 2005 that delivers concentrated light to a pregnant woman), and the Chromo-lens, a tool that combined his interest in colored glass and treated liquids, were all utilized in therapeutic practice. Dinshah’s apparatus, a tool that could easily be shared with his legions of followers, was simpler:

ILLUMINATION - PRELUDE TO DHARMAKAYA LIGHT 2005 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000