Spencer Finch is well known for installations that reflect and alter perceptions of light and color. Typically they are installed in glass atriums or windows, and consist of colored gels or panels that act as intermediaries between external and internal chromatic effects. Finch often employs a scientific approach, gathering information on the intensity of color that is absorbed by a site, the movement of sunlight throughout a space, or the refractive qualities of water or clouds, translating the data into vibrant, kinetic works that immerse the viewer in kaleidoscopic silhouettes.

His current installation, “A Certain Slant of Light,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, consists of hundreds of square film panels affixed on all sides throughout the four-story glass walls of the Morgan’s Gilbert Court. As sunlight moves around the space each day, and during the seasons, it filters through the panels, sometimes casting intensely colored beams. Suspended from the ceiling, 12 clear glass panels turn slowly, transmitting further migratory reflections.

The piece takes its conceptual framework from books of hours — popular from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance — of which the Morgan holds the country’s most extensive collection. These were often lavishly illustrated prayer books containing several parts including, most importantly, the Hours of the Virgin, from which books of hours derive their name. This was a series of prayers to be recited throughout the day to the mother of Christ, who was regarded as an intercessor between humanity and God. They can be regarded as the iPhones of their day: religiously venerated, checked multiple times a day, directing life by the hour, and providing essential texts. A calendar was also a standard feature, not defined by 365 numerical dates as we would use, but structured around the feast days of saints, and events in the life of Jesus. The most important of these liturgical dates throughout each 12-month cycle were written in red, hence the origin of the term “red letter day.”

“A Certain Slant of Light” is intended to operate as a calendar of sorts, as well as an optical feast. When calendars in books of hours were illustrated, they depicted the traditional labors of each month, with color palettes varying according to those seasonal tasks. Finch has allocated a season to each side of Gilbert Court and varied the palette of his panels accordingly. The north wall is winter, the east is spring, the south is summer, and west, autumn. Throughout are intensely hued red panels, in reference to the most vital of dates in books of hours, only here they represent secular instances that Finch finds compelling — such as Isaac Newton’s birthday — and that were planned to align at noon with the sun’s trajectory on those dates.

The conceptual panoply upon which this project rests is magnificent: it spans centuries, draws directly from among the greatest canonical manuscripts, gleans motifs from the crowning events of religious history, while utilizing astronomy and the photonic power of our home star to ignite it. Even the press release conjures the sublime; though it is perhaps this illustrious framing that causes a sense of deficiency to come to light.

On a sunny day the visual allure of the piece is enjoyable, and it can be appreciated for this alone, but while many visitors may be only peripherally aware of the culture surrounding books of hours, the more one understands of them, the more derivative the installation becomes. The paralleling of colors, seasons and calendars istight and clever, but predictably, superficially so, as thin conceptualism often is when employed to imbue contemporary art with meaning and a patina of relevance. Here, it is insufficient to grant the piece its own authority or self-confidence when set against the mystical historicism surrounding Finch’s source material.

Despite the artist’s meticulous approach, there are practical incongruities that undermine the conceptual integrity. Knowledge of the work’s lofty inspiration doesn’t prevent its visual proximity to the kind of empty decorative design found in shopping malls — something Gilbert Court’s architecture convincingly emulates — where coloring vast glass swathes is an easy solution to transform bland environments. Furthermore, on overcast days the work is rendered disappointingly dormant.

Two of the four sides of the court are glass curtain walls with expansive connection to the sky beyond, effective backdrops for Finch’s panels. But the winter season is located on an internal glass wall that fronts offices. These panels are duller and, if the blinds are up, people can distractingly be seen working at their desks. Hopefully this isn’t explained as being passable because winter is a darker time. Autumn fares even worse, diminished and fragmented by the architecture where there are no substantial areas of glass, presenting an unwelcome contrast with how well the two external walls function.

Perhaps it was by necessity of having to fit in 365 panels, but placing them on the glass elevator seems excessive. Considering the sun’s stately influence and the sedate movement of light and color around the room, witnessing the elevator panels comparatively racing up and down is corrupting to almost comical effect. They are literally taken out of context. The work could be in place for a year and maintenance on such a long-term installation is important — peeling, bubbled panels cheapen the impression dreadfully. These points may seem like trifles, but collectively they undermine the work’s coherence and precision, separating it from the immense detail and quality that epitomize the artifacts from which Finch draws.

A larger question here is whether or not it is advisable in every instance for modern artists to reference as they please from art history just because they can or a site lends itself to it. When done with wit or social perspicacity it can initiate progressive dialog and render art valuable beyond economic worth elevating it into the canon. Grayson Perry, Kehinde Wiley, and Francis Bacon all engaged with art of the past to make fascinating cultural commentary. Alternatively, the Chapman Brothers’ smug, petulant vandalism of a series of Goya prints serves only to highlight their own vacuous posturing and artistic bankruptcy.

In selecting to operate between past and present, don’t contemporary artists have a responsibility to themselves, and their audience, to forge a meaningful relationship between eras, and excavate significant reason for doing so, or risk exposing their efforts as lackluster and flimsy in the face of the reverence bestowed upon art that has withstood the mercurial tastes of ages? Technical and visual execution must also uphold the artist’s intent.

Finch’s installation lacks the emotive capacity to fuel as much interest or controversy as some of the above-mentioned artists did, and while he was not trying to recreate an extant book of hours, that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility to the vast gravity of his source. “A Certain Slant of Light” siphons the language and culture of the masters who created such tomes, and that it draws any lineage with those treasures is to its grievous detriment.

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Kneeling where Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue triangulates Atlantic and Fourth, my job was to hold the end of a measuring tape against a street lamp. At the other end, sculptor George Trakas calculated the distance to an open spot in the triangle and noted it on a drawing he brought with him. The purpose of this exercise was to corroborate a spot on the unfinished plaza surrounding the Atlantic Avenue subway kiosk where a tree could take root without interfering with the usual tangle of utilities beneath the asphalt. Trakas had earlier delineated this patch of earth as the best place to plant a Silver Linden, a tree that would serve as the culmination of a project he has labored over for a decade.

We met at the Atlantic Avenue station to tour Hook, Line and Sinker, the abbreviated title for an amalgam of interconnected sculptural elements riffing off the commercial and natural history of this busy transit hub. The project was initiated in 2004, but to date, the northwest end of the street-level plaza remains unfinished, closed off to traffic by painted demarcations and temporary lighting. Trakas envisions this section to be elevated a foot or two to the height of the finished plaza and shaded by the tree.

Currently all that rises above pedestrian level is the landmark-protected brick and sandstone kiosk, designed by Heins & LaFarge in 1904. Though abandoned as an entrance after the station’s renovation, the kiosk was preserved for its elegance, its symbolism of past civic munificence, and to provide a skylight for the expanded public space below. Work on the plaza surrounding the kiosk was partially completed in 2004 and updated in 2013 with enhancements by Trakas, working in conjunction with Parsons Brinckerhoff di Menico and Partners, including granite seating elements meant to be shaded by the tree. But the end of the plaza is unfinished, and as long as it remains so, and as long as the tree remains unplanted, Hook, Line and Sinker will also be incomplete. The tree is crucial to the interlocking metaphor Trakas has wrought below ground.

Hook (Archean Reach), Line (Sea House) and Sinker (Mined Swell), the full title for the tripartite installation, addresses the borough’s development along roads that extend inland from its waterfront. As a port city’s pathways tend to develop perpendicularly from the water, Brooklyn’s gently curving shore caused its neighborhood streets to clash at odd angles, thus creating the borough’s distinctive civic centers. It is this web of routes emanating from the sea (as much as the street names themselves) that inspired Trakas to introduce nautical imagery to an underground subway station.

With an extensive body of site-specific sculptures stretching from La Jolla and Bellingham to the banks of the Hudson River at Beacon and at Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, Trakas has earned a reputation as an artist committed to reminding us of our archetypal connections to the water’s edge. Addressing public concerns ranging from shorefront repair and reclamation to simple accessibility (and often both) Trakas has dedicated his career to creating places rather than pieces. He is not a monument builder. Visitors to his Newtown Creek Nature Walk (2007) in Greenpoint sometimes raise the question, where’s the art? What Trakas brings to his work and what he leaves for the public to contemplate is a deep sense of what was there originally, how it shaped the site he encountered, and how it affected what he built on it, or beside it, or within it.

My guided tour of Hook, Line and Sinker began with explicit instructions from the artist that I was to take the D train from Bleecker Street to the Atlantic Avenue stop, just one of many paths I could have followed to the site. Taking this particular route was intended to prepare me for a narrative of movement and landscape that informs the sculpture. My trip began underground at Bleecker, stretched over East River via the Manhattan Bridge, descended again beneath Flatbush Avenue to the inevitable ascension, this time by foot, back to street level — a rolling sea voyage, replayed as an ordinary commuter trip. When I met up with him at the Pacific Street entrance he launched into the history of the work and how its title invites and encourages overlapping interpretations.

Hook (Archean Reach) refers to the curved passageway leading from the Pacific Street entrance to the tracks below, which he has emphasized with a sculptural wainscot of polished metamorphic granite, undulating wave-like as it amplifies the floor’s gently rolling movement from turnstile to platform. Substantially more sculptural than the ceramic tile wall it undergirds, both its weight and color succeed as image and structural enhancement. Care was taken in its design so as not to interrupt the commercial and practical aspects of its location. Thus clean breaks were inserted to allow for a newsstand, vents and maintenance doors.

The sculptural aspect of Line (Sea House) is more implied than physically present, as it constitutes the interior vertical space directly below the kiosk. The kiosk itself has been transformed into a symbolic lighthouse, while architecturally serving as a clerestory opening, providing daylight to the platform and stairs below. For this space Trakas had originally settled on the inclusion of new steel markers embedded in the old walls where the original stair stringers once descended to a cramped landing. But an opportunity to solve an unforeseen problem led to one of the site’s more overt seagoing references. Electric lamps had to be installed to provide lighting at night, raising the issue of how fixtures were to be maintained in the now-floorless kiosk hovering over the stairs. The solution was a rolling gantry Trakas designed in the shape of a boat hull, with a functioning helm able to move the entire structure laterally on rails across the open space, thus providing maintenance workers (entering through the now-locked street-level doors) the ability to re-lamp light fixtures, while inadvertently enriching the artist’s rail and sea metaphors.

Sinker (Mined Swell) is an incline made of huge quarry-faced granite blocks that widen on their dressed sides as they descend between parallel staircases below the sky-lit platforms to the lower trains. They follow the stairs while enclosing the base of several steel columns. As the most massively sculptural element in the design, Sinker creates a visceral outcrop of bedrock that, when washed with the daylight from above, emphasizes the connection between street traffic and its subterranean rail extensions.

What’s missing is the tree: a single declarative chord sounding the opening of the three movements playing below. Not only would it provide an organic contrast to the steel and masonry underground, its branches would reach out toward incoming commuters from every direction, its roots suggesting the disseminating subterranean routes.

Trakas had submitted his proposal for the final plaza design to MTA’s Arts for Transit program and to the DOT in 2011, including the drawing that showed the exact spot where the tree could be planted. According to Bonny Tsang at the Department of Transportation’s press office, “DOT has been working with community stakeholders and Forest City Ratner Companies to develop a plan for this plaza. The formal design phase will be initiated in the near future.” Apparently the decision has yet to be finalized.

The question of whose design will be applied to the remaining street level space remains open and thus explains the long delay in finishing the project. When decisions are tossed back and forth between city agencies, while developers and “various stakeholders” vie for advantage, the only thing that is certain is that the artist, though a primary stakeholder, is but one voice.

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