quirkblog

My Axioms

2012-01-25T16:17:00.000-05:00

An abstract painting is not an idea, nor is it devoid of ideas.

Nicholas Krushenick, “Outspan,” 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches

* * * * *

An abstract painting is not solely an object, nor can it be separated from its object-ness.

Pat Steir, “Green, Gold and Umber” 2009-10, Oil on canvas, 60 1/2 x 51 in.

* * * * *

An abstract painting does not depict, nor does it turn its back on the world.

Norman Bluhm, “Aegean Angel,” 1988, oil on canvas, 66 x 66 inches

* * * * *

An abstract painting is a node among the threads of our bodily and interior experience.

Joan Snyder, “Are Mine,” 2010, Oil acrylic, glitter, rosebuds and burlap on panel, 30 in. x 30 in.

Symbiosis

2012-01-03T16:15:00.000-05:00

Paul Cézanne, Bend in a Road in Provence, about 1866 or later, oil on canvas, 92.4 x 72.5 cm, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Adaline Van Horne Bequest

“The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or a persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition.”

From “Cézanne’s Doubt” (pdf) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Newgrange

2011-06-01T20:38:00.004-04:00

A reader asked me last week why I have a photo of Newgrange in the header of the blog. Newgrange is a group of Neolithic mounds and structures about 40 miles north of Dublin. The World Heritage Site is also called Brú na Bóinne, which translates from the Irish roughly as “Palace on the Boyne,” and the River Boyne circumambulates three sides of the grounds. The main mound is the one pictured in the header. It’s over 5,000 years old, and pre-dates the Great Pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge by 500 and 1,000 years respectively.

Entrance to Newgrange mound. Photo courtesy Locutus Borg, via Wikipedia.

The site is awesome. The mound, now extensively restored, is around 250 feet across and faced with cubes of brilliant white quartz. Massive slabs inscribed with whorls and spirals encircle the base of the mound. It sits at the crest of a gently rising greensward, and grass carpets the top of the mound as well. To enter you duck under a stone lintel and walk or sidestep down a claustrophobic passage to the tiny chamber in the center, which has small transepts on three sides, if I remember right. The mound is remarkable for its size and persistence, for the aura and magnitude of its symbolic significance, and for the mindboggling meditation it provokes on the amount of industry it must have taken to construct it with the technology available. It also has a special light show every winter solstice, as rays from the sun streak through the precisely situated entrance and illuminate the chamber at the center of the interior. A small group of interested members of the public are chosen by lot each year to witness this moment.

Inside the Newgrange passageway during the solstice. Photo by Cyril Byrne, Courtesy of the Irish Times.

* * * * *

My familial connection to Ireland is strong (despite little direct contact with the place), as my background is wholly Irish. I also have a thriving “green gene,” as my brother calls it, which helps me anticipate the worst possible outcome of any situation, prepares me for failure in the unlikely event success is imminent, and initiates damage control after a favorable occurrence, in advance of the demise that will follow as surely as earthworms emerge after a spring rain.

In 2006, I went there for the first time, with Amy and her family. Our outing on the day of arrival, a groggy, post-transatlantic afternoon, was to Newgrange. After the tour we headed back to the hotel, stopping at an arts and crafts store we’d spotted on the drive to the site. It was run by a genial couple, with the assistance of their energetic and charming children, who had a practical competence beyond their years.

Craft store and workshop near Newgrange. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Madden.

From this lovely outpost, you can see Newgrange on the hill. I was standing in the parking lot, staring in what must have been too-obvious reverie at the looming ancient structure, when the husband came out of his workshop and quipped, “Not bad, eh?”

Visiting the workshop with currach under construction. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Madden.

He took a break from his work and graciously showed us around. Inside the workshop, he was building a currach (pronounced KUR-ak). The traditional currach is a dinghy-like craft made of bowed spars. Animal hides, usually cow, stitched together and stretched over the spars, form shell of the boat. He told us that currachs were used during the mound’s construction to transport massive quantities of stone for the foundation from quarries upriver. Some estimates hold that there are around 200,000 tons of stone (or 400 million pounds, to render the figure in human terms, if not scale) that undergird the mound. This gentleman was building currachs in the ancient manner, creating boats identical to what one might have seen hauling rock down the River Boyne thousands of years ago. It’s a laborious method of boat construction. He joked that some of his friends had given up ever seeing him again, and few stopped in to visit for fear of being put to work.

Currach at the Visitor Center, Newgrange. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Madden.

* * * * *

At present, for better or worse, and unlike most other historical periods I am familiar with, there are few clear cultural demands from society on what is expected of artists. If there were a strong connection to an enduring artistic and cultural heredity, it could simplify matters by giving artists a framework for their production—the what, why and for whom.

Present conditions largely mandate that artists generate their own aesthetic and philosophical ground rules. The result is that the impact of a contemporary work is likely to be more diluted or insular than work created within a cultural system where there is wider consensus on art’s purpose and meaning. The upside is that the potential range of subject matter now available is infinitely broader and multi-faceted. It’s a trade-off. One remedy is to explicitly address current events or issues. This provides a readymade connection to viewers familiar with the topic. Still, it’s hard to tether contemporary work to larger life narratives found in religious works like icons or epics of past periods, for example, as there is little present agreement on what such themes might be and how they should be treated.

For an analogy, look at ceremonies. In a Catholic mass, everyone knows what will happen; they know what to do and when. Whatever your thoughts on liturgies or the Church, the ceremony, developed over centuries and learned by parishioners from childhood, gives structure to worship and has the authority of something that has endured and been repeated by millions before you. Compare that to any ceremony you’ve developed on your own for a special event. If your results were as unconvincing as mine, you’ll see right away the profound difference between the two. It’s not easy to cook up out of air something that will have gravity and meaning, something that connects organically and convincingly to vital aspects of life in the way a ceremony is expected to, though the wedding of two friends some years ago, which was personalized in moving ways, was a memorable exception that proves the rule.

I attend Zen services periodically. They are almost exactly like the Zen services performed in Japan for hundreds of years, and in superficial terms the liturgy has the heft and presence of something that’s been around for a long time and polished by many hands. It’s not my ceremony though, at least not yet, and no matter how genuine my intent, I sometimes feel artificial.

In art, conservative critics rail that the current challenges here described are actually evidence of the artistic bankruptcy—or even turpitude—of the moment. They cite as further evidence a decline in craft, a conclusion based on selective sampling, and the trivial nature of some responses to the challenges, as if trivialities have not abounded in every era. In fact, these conditions are just symptoms of the natural consequences of history and demographics. They’re aspects of being an artist now that have to be dealt with, the same way artists had to successfully work with all kinds of patrons in times past to succeed. Atavism won’t help. (Though I know artists who sometimes look longingly at the patronage system given the current condition of the art market.) Addressing broad themes in compelling and universal terms is not feasible in the way it’s been in other historical moments given the numerical realities and lack of consensus. Meaning rides the local.

* * * * *

When I stood in that parking lot gazing up at the mound, I was overwhelmed by the presence and physicality of the thing, by a sense of connection to the past, to a cultural foundation I was distantly related to, and to the lives of ancient others, lives spent laboring to create this gargantuan relic in response to what must have been powerful needs, needs that we can only speculate about, needs so intense that they demanded the stupefying expenditure of time, energy and resources it took to build the site, needs that place contemporary debates in their proper proportion, needs that give a legacy a living pulse. At that moment, I felt that I was standing on a platform built 5,000 years ago, and that somehow the support it provided would help me move forward and work with greater clarity, directness and purpose. In an oblique way, it has, and I still think of it in moments of creative despondency. Not bad.

"...perfection is less interesting"

2011-04-17T11:54:00.000-04:00

Derveni Papyrus

"In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing."

Anne Carson, The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 88, Fall 2004.

Radical Invention

2011-01-23T17:01:00.003-05:00

Henri Matisse painting Bathers by a River, May 13, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester

Well, I made it to Matisse, Radical Invention, 1913-1917. The artist’s pass turned out to be useful as well as economical; it allowed me entry even though all the timed admissions for the day had been issued. Usually, I find the titles of big shows to be a little hyperbolic, but this one was apt. These paintings made me see Matisse in a way I had not seen him before, which is not a platitude or inert, as I had not only seen many of the paintings already, but I have been looking at Matisse pretty close up ever since I began looking at paintings, in college. At that time, I lived near the Baltimore Museum of Art, which was home to the Cone Collection, the amazing array of paintings amassed by the two sisters from Baltimore, who were patrons of Matisse and others artists in Paris. They almost gave the collection to another institution, thinking that "Hey hon’!" City didn’t deserve it. I’m glad as hell they didn’t as it was a major part of my visual education.

The work Matisse did in the time period covered by this exhibition was always puzzling to me. For some reason, I could never read the paintings well or understand their motivations and their excellence. Sometimes they looked like an obligatory foray into cubism, other times they just felt torpid. This has changed. The paintings combined gritty, intensely worked surfaces, willful unconcern for finish, and of course remarkable color. Maybe you just don't see things until you are ready, or maybe the collection of these pieces is a credit to the focus of the curators. Or both. The show just knocked me flat.

The images below are taken from the catalogue (Matisse, Radical Invention 1913-1917, Yale University Press, 2010). The color reproduction is extremely accurate in the catalogue. That is somewhat unusual. I have come out of many big exhibitions at big museums, looked at the catalogue and been severely disappointed. It must be very difficult to do well. We recently picked up a good digital camera. Shots of recent paintings of mine are astoundingly accurate on the computer display. That's the easy part, apparently. The process of getting images from a computer onto a page is clearly an art in itself, so kudos to the brilliant folks who pulled it off here. And the price is extremely reasonable. You know you want one.

Click on the images for larger resolutions.

Blue Nude, oil on canvas, 36 in. x 55 in., 1907, Baltimore Museum of Art, Cone Collection.

The Blue Nude always hung in a prominent place in the Cone Collection. I probably saw 30 times over the course of the years I was in Baltimore, maybe more. The painting is much rougher and powerfully unkempt than I recalled. There is a shadow of the right arm hardly bothered with. A yellow splotch on the shoulder, a blue-grey blob indicating the inside of the upper arm, and so on. The color has a kind of sick timbre, and the whole painting exudes a disjointedness and ardent, get-it-done vigor without the expressive self-consciousness sometimes associated with that mode of painting. Fantastic, fantastic painting. I think I spent half an hour in front of it in total.

The Blue Window, oil on canvas, 52 in. x 36 in., 1913, Museum of Modern Art.

There is no respect for the process of background first and foreground next in a lot of these paintings, he simply slops the background on, over and into the foreground objects. In The Blue Window, there is a weird, scraped out oval at the top. The scuffed paint resembles a scab. There are many areas in the paintings from the show that have similar abrasions or wear that belie the veneer of elegance often associated with Matisse’s work. The palimpsest of labor and impatience is evident especially in the Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg, with areas scraped raw of paint, as well as incised and hatched lines. It is as if a record of dissatisfaction had to be retained in the body of the painting.

Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg, oil on canvas, 58 in. x 38 in., 1914, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Goldfish with Palette, oil on canvas, 58 in. x 44 in., 1915. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The black center background in Goldfish with Palette is an immense vacuum. The black is painted right around the objects. It is spatially adventurous, in the manner of cubism, but is segmented on a larger scale. The painting is divided into blocks and angular chunks of space, not microfolds. The dry brushwork and striations from the palette knife become a structural component of the color, and create a sense of contingency.

Piano Lesson, oil on canvas, 97 in. x 84 in., 1916. Museum of Modern Art.

Piano Lesson is a big painting, hugely sophisticated. The green triangle is so bold, but also reads as light—late afternoon light to me—despite its seemingly impenetrable opacity.

Bathers by a River, oil on canvas, 103 in. x 154 in., 1917. Art Institute of Chicago.

Almost 9 x 13 feet. The larger-than-life figures in Bathers reveal themselves over time, shown in the process of coming into being, emerging from fractured voids. It doesn’t have the underpinning of geometric or analytical study, but still tears the subject apart. The painting is both violent and generous—Matisse slices the field to sashimi like a samurai in Kurosawa film—but at the same time it shows humane sensitivity to human perception and the way we perceive in time. The severity of the design and restricted palette is tempered by the grace of the fronds and curved elements. A kind of “subjective” alternative to cubism, it's a different way of approaching a spatial study, less angular and more in concord with our bodies and vision.

As historical artifacts, I can’t remember seeing any paintings from this period or any period before this that were so raw and deliberately unpolished. They must have made a mark on his contemporaries. They certainly made an impression on me, almost 100 years later. And with work like this:

Ian McLeod, Untitled #31, 19.5" x 16.75" (irregular), acrylic, latex, tape, sticker and varathane on cardboard (2010?). More here.

...and this:

View of Joe Bradley's studio. Photo: Jack Siegel. These paintings are on display at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York until 19 February 2011. See also here for James Kalm's video.

...and this:

Cheryl Donegan, Luxury Dust (Gold), 2007, gold tape on cardboard, 24 × 18 inches. Donegan's work is also included in the Jewel Thief exhibition, up through 27 February 2011 at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs.

...being made these days, I find surprising affinities.

Coda

“Sometimes I hear [the monks] say, ‘I didn’t become a monk to practice the Dharma! I ordained to study.’ These are the words of someone who has completely cut off the path of practice. It’s a dead end.”

—Ajahn Chah

From the mailbag

2010-11-28T07:31:00.003-05:00

Paul Cezanne, Bend in Forest Road, 1904-1906

Letter to Clara Rilke-Westoff from R. M. Rilke
21 October, 1907
Paris

"...There's something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity. Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of."

From Letters on Cézanne, edited by Clara Rilke-Westhoff, translated by Joel Agee, 1985.

Vocabulary

2010-11-03T15:39:00.001-04:00

In the past couple of days, while putting together some information on my work, I had to look at paintings from some years back and articulate ideas about my painting vocabulary and the way it developed at that time. The motivations for the changes I made then were visceral skepticism of certain types of marks and gestures, and a desire to rethink my syntax. It was a complicated process. A few years ago, I was recounting it in some detail with my brother—who is very knowledgeable on contemporary thought—and he said, “You know all those weird French theories? Well, you got there by yourself.”

Around that time, I was noticing more and more different types of marks around me: oil slicks on the street, paint spills on the floor, coffee stains on the table and other similar things. These were interesting in part because they were the remains of other actions. They had a kind of authority, that of an unselfconscious activity, that a gesture in a painting could not. For example, one day I had cut out a piece of card stock and walked away, then returned to see this framed bit of my work table:

A few weeks later it had turned into this:

These seemed to me completely satisfying as images. Paint can rings, gel spills, sand embedded into the table via unintended adhesive effect, the slices of a razor into the wood—all artifacts of prior tasks. It also got me started thinking about color in a different way, too. The colors artists use are gorgeous, unguent, saturated things. They are both immensely attractive and utterly unlike most of colors around us in our daily surroundings, which are more neutral, utilitarian and unspectacular.

When we do see an astounding color, it is unforgettable, like the late spring day I saw one of these outside my window in Brooklyn:

Scarlet Tanager, photo by Glen K. Peterson

By contrast, I looked six floors straight down at the pavement one morning and caught this zany mess:

Someone had dumped two five-gallon containers of ice cream on the sidewalk and left them to melt and decompose.

I decided to start working with a vocabulary of residual marks, or marks that were ambiguous regarding their origin in some way. Doing a painting while obscuring traces of how the marks arrived presents some curious challenges, especially if one wants to retain dynamism in a painting while abjuring the more conspicuous fingerprints of the maker. Of course, it requires artifice to achieve the effect, but artists know better than anyone how much artifice it takes to make art seem artless, and once that is accepted it vaporizes some of the conundrums around ideas of authenticity and genuineness. Often there is a negative correlation between what something looks like and how it got there. Malcolm Morley told me that the red “X” he painted on “Race Track” that looks dashed off was painstakingly planned and applied. This is another example of how our conditioning to the syntax of painting after 50,000 years (at the minimum) is so complex, vexatious, unavoidable and rewarding.

Malcolm Morley, Race Track (South Africa), 71.6 in. x 91.7 in. (182 cm x 233 cm), acrylic, wax and acrylic resin on canvas, 1970, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (photo: Ludwig Museum)

In my studio, these meditations led to this right out of the gate:

Increase, 28 in. x 42 in. (71 cm x 107 cm), oil, silicon, spray paint and pencil on paper mounted on linen over panel, 2005.

And a bit later this:

I Ask You, 30 in. x 44 in. (76 cm x 122 cm), oil, acrylic and spray paint on paper mounted on linen over panel, 2006.

And developed into this after about a year:

Brú na Bóinne, 68 in. x 68 in. overall (173 cm x 173 cm), oil, alkyd, acrylic, metallic paint and sand on canvas over panel, 2006.

I usually find particular things for a reason, and the reason is often that the groundwork or foundations that need the “discoveries” are already inside, waiting to be paired with an external catalyst. After a while, the tacit motivation for a particular result becomes less important, and things flow more organically while working. In general, doing things for a prescribed end in painting seems less and less a good idea to me. At best such a concern can be distracting; at worst it skirts dogma, which is toxic to art.

Having an explicit teleological or “that for the sake of which” target for a work can obscure broader possibilities. I also think it’s intuitively obvious that one creates richer and deeper work when one yields to what one finds along the way, rather than working toward a predetermined conclusion, no matter how important the aspiration or noble the intent. Philip Guston once related a useful comment by John Cage that bears on this: “When you are working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, the art world, and above all your own ideas…But as you continue painting, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” (Michael Auping; “A Disturbance in the Field," in Philip Guston, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000.)

Nathaniel Dorsky films at Anthology Film Archives

2010-09-30T17:25:00.000-04:00

Still from Sarabande by Nathaniel Dorsky, 16mm, color, silent, 15 minutes.

Anthology Film Archives will be showing many films by Nathaniel Dorsky next week. Films for the 4 October program are the most recent; I am not sure if some of them have been publicly screened yet in New York. More information here. Interview with Dorsky by Darren Hughes here. A couple of my posts on Dorsky here and here. These films don't come around that often, although he seems to be becoming somewhat better known. They are gorgeous and challenging works. Not to miss.

Museum of Modern Art "Artist's Pass"

2010-08-02T17:46:00.002-04:00

Henri Matisse. Bathers by a River. 1909–10, 1913, 1916–17. Oil on canvas, 102 1/2 x 154 3/16" (260 x 392 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Good news for those artists (moi) who have been carping about MOMA's prices since they reopened. They offer an "Artist's Pass" which is significantly cheaper than an annual membership. For 25 clams you get admission to the museum for a year. All you need to do is bring to the museum a hard copy of an exhibition announcement, print out from a website announcement, or any document that shows you have been in an exhibition in the past two years. Take it to the information desk at the museum to get your annual pass. (They're not allowed to search the web for your show at the info desk; that's why they need the hard copy.) There are no member benefits (such as access to early viewing hours), but for shows like "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917," which has timed entrances, you can get in at any time. Where have I been?

Speaking of Matisse, I am very interested in seeing this exhibition; it is one of his most perplexing and difficult periods for me. The show is up until 11 October. Also, the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show opened, has a fascinating online tool that shows the above painting in its various states, with all kinds of gizmos to play with.

And why yes, since you asked, I do plan on spending a bit more time here.

Coda

“If, during an improvised solo, a sideman forgot whose music he was playing as he flew into the wild blue yonder, he might never be able to return. One night, at the Five Spot in New York, I watched John Coltrane get off the stand after a set with Monk. Coltrane looked dazed and dismayed. ‘I lost my place,’ he said, ‘and it was like falling down an open elevator shaft.’”

Nat Hentoff on Thelonious Monk, from “Listen to the Stories”

Philip Guston

2010-01-17T20:18:00.005-05:00

Untitled (Cup), Philip Guston, oil on panel, 11 in. x 14 in. (btw. 1969 and 1973). Photo McKee Gallery, www.mckeegallery.com

A show of terrific paintings by Philip Guston at McKee gallery in New York closed a week ago Saturday. They were small paintings on panel, around 12 in. x 16 in., all the same size or close to it. The paintings were mostly of household objects—cups, shoes, etc.—as well as some of his hooded figures and cityscapes, done between 1969 and 1973. The photographs do them scant justice (but click on them for a larger view anyway).

These little paintings have immense vitality. The palette is restricted to red, white, black and occasional green. The objects or structures are simple and rudimentarily rendered. The elementary limitations give him a framework, and within it he lays claim to a kind of liberty in painting that is infrequently seen but always cherished by anyone who gives a damn about painting.

Untitled (Sole), Philip Guston, oil on panel, 12 in. x 16 in. (btw. 1969 and 1973). Photo McKee Gallery, www.mckeegallery.com

The marks are virtuoso: little hatches, wet into wet; swirls and smears; perfunctory dashes and blobs. Every stroke is direct, no-nonsense and unaffected; their aggregate conveys a feeling of honesty, authority and self-knowledge. The paintings, deceptively simple and generous despite exiguous means, radiate life.

Coda

“The degree of intellectual honesty that is obligatory for me, by reason of my particular vocation, demands that my thought should be indifferent to all ideas without exception, including for instance materialism and atheism; it must be equally welcoming and equally reserved with regard to every one of them. Water is indifferent in this way to the objects that fall into it. It does not weigh them; they weigh themselves, after a certain time of oscillation.”

Simone Weil, Letter to S., Waiting for God, Perennial, 2001. Translated by Emma Craufurd.

St. Lucy's Day

2009-12-21T15:55:00.003-05:00

Portrait of John Donne, artist unknown, 1595

A nocturnall upon St. Lucies day, Being the shortest day

Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes ;
    The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes ;
            The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
   For I am every dead thing,
   In whom love wrought new Alchemie.
            For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptiness:
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
    I, by Love's limbecke, am the grave
    Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
            Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know; I should preferre,
            If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, 'a light, and body must be here.

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser Sunne
    At this time to the Goat is runne
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
            Enjoy your summer all,
Since shee enjoys her long night's festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the yeares and the dayes deep midnight is.

—John Donne
From the Complete Poetry of John Donne, John T. Shawcross, editor

Varieties of Disturbance

2009-12-05T15:35:00.006-05:00

Reading Lydia Davis for the first time this morning, and drinking coffee on a grey Saturday as the first snow of the season falls. In this book, aptly titled Varieties of Disturbance, she displays a fine sensitivity for the aquifers of fleeting emotions, subtle evaluations and minute perceptions and sensations that constitute the unexamined dimensions of internal life. These streams can unconsciously determine moment-to-moment decisions, or influence larger ones as they rise, coalesce, and break into consciousness. In the stories I have read so far, the sensations, as advertised, are irritating. “The Caterpillar” relates finding a tiny caterpillar in the house, which the protagonist charitably decides to remove to the garden, but instead loses in transport on a dusty stairwell. Now more likely to step on it than save it, the nagging urge to find the caterpillar surfaces, hour after hour, spurred by incidental circumstances, and is followed by a faint ethical malaise that persists beyond any hope of rescue.

“Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho,” goes even further by irritating the reader directly, rather than irritating a character with whom one may or may not empathize. The brief narrative describes reading the ineffable late Beckett work on a bus trip, and is rendered in clipped, willfully efficient prose that echoes without mimicking Beckett’s own challenging words, which are themselves embedded directly into the story as little enigmas. Appended to this is a series of footnotes at the bottom of each page, where the tale is told more fully and comfortably. The footnotes contain maybe three times as many words as the narrative they amplify. This exploits the subtle and meddlesome dynamic one experiences when reading a book with footnotes: when does one interrupt the flow of one’s apprehension to get perhaps vital (perhaps useless, it can’t be known yet) information about what one is reading? The tension is sharpened once one realizes that the footnotes have more flow, and provide fuller information with less labor. Which was the narrative and which was the gloss? As I read, there were pinpoint peaks of discomfort that accompanied my decisions (was I really deciding?), as I switched back and forth between the spartan narrative and flowing footnotes, at times seeking the path of least resistance below, and other times pursuing a more hard-won satisfaction above. This in turn caused me to ask what reading is. To what degree was I goal seeking, and to what degree does was I truly following the writing, letting it lead to new territory? How were these dynamics playing out within the time-based activity of reading, and, in this case, what was I to do with the subliminal fabric exposed?

This is thoughtfully crafted, innovative and conceptually ambitious writing.

In Broken Images

2009-12-01T19:37:00.002-05:00

I can't think of anything better than this poem to share with you today. It has been on my mind a lot in recently. It was sent to me several years ago by my good friend Glen Davis. He thought it might resonate with my sense of what it meant to be an artist. My response was to memorize it immediately. Perhaps you will, too.

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question their fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
when the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

— Robert Graves

It never hurts to be good looking

2009-10-17T14:26:00.012-04:00

In Advance of the Broken Arm, Marcel Duchamp, 1964 (1915 version lost). Courtesy MoMA, http://www.moma.org

The op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, by Dennis Dutton, "Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?" will doubtless provoke brouhaha from foreseeable quarters. It is not a bad article, however, despite the tiresome Morley Safer-if-you-can-believe-this-I-have-a-bridge-for-sale-it's-all-a-ponzi-scheme tone. It simply points out, in a long-winded way, that once contexts are stripped from an artwork, the artwork is on it's own, and depends on its appearance to stay out of the dumpster. Nothing we didn't know.

The firstest-bestest example of this is Duchamp's In Advance of the Broken Arm, the shovel pictured above. It was once used by a museum custodian to clear the walks after a snowstorm, which Duchamp thought was hilarious. To reinforce Dutton's point, the original shovel was lost.

There are plenty of presumptions in the article to puncture, but this conclusion, regarding the beautiful artifact, was a bit bizarre:

Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human prehistory, tools attractively fashioned to function as what Darwinians call “fitness signals” — displays like the glorious peacock’s tail, which functions to show peahens the strength and vitality of the males who display it.

Hand axes, however, were not grown, but consciously, cleverly made. They were therefore able to indicate desirable personal qualities: intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability and conscientiousness. Such skills gained for those who displayed them status and a reproductive advantage over the less capable. Across many thousands of generations this translated into both an increase in intelligence and an evolved sense that the symmetry and craftsmanship of hand axes is “beautiful.”

I wasn't aware fine motor skills were so desirable to pre-Neanderthals.

One thing is for certain, and that is that all art has become much more self-consciously conceptual. In that sense conceptualism isn't going anywhere. Few artists make work without at least considering the intellectual precepts and ramifications of what they are creating. Whether that means that work solely dependent on a sophisticated web of reasoning and contextual bases to establish its relevance and meaning will remain compelling, we can't know. Maybe what we are now sorting out is what is vital and what is merely scholastic in the intellectual provinces of our artistic pursuits.

Paul Celan’s “Zurich, At The Stork”

2009-09-28T22:03:00.019-04:00

Zurich, At The Stork (for Nelly Sachs)

Our talk was of Too Much, of
Too Little. Of Thou
and Yet-Thou, of
clouding through brightness, of [“of how clarity troubles”]
Jewishness, of
your God.

Of
that.
On the day of an ascension, the
Minster stood over there, it came
with some gold across the water.

Our talk was of your God, I spoke
against him, I let the heart
I had
hope:
for
his highest, death-rattled, his
wrangling word—

Your eye looked at me, looked away,
your mouth
spoke toward the eye, I heard:

We
really don’t know, you know,
we
really don’t know
what
counts.

(Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, Translation by John Felstiner, W.W. Norton, 2001. The phrase in brackets is an alternate translation of that line by Michael Hamburger from Poems of Paul Celan, Persea Books, 1995, that I found helpful.)

Some Celan (and Sachs) appropriately, on Yom Kippur. I have been reading this poem for a couple of years, and had not planned it like this, but who knows what agencies work beyond periphery of our awareness.

This poem was written on 30 May 1960, and relates a conversation that Celan and Nelly Sachs had at her hotel, The Stork, four days prior. It was the first of few meetings they had. Sachs was there to receive a German literary prize in Meersburg, but the prospect of staying overnight in Germany caused her such anxiety that she lodged across the border instead. (Felstiner; Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew; p. 156) To me it is one of Celan’s most important poems, dealing directly with the pain and aftermath of the Holocaust. It is a depiction of a kind of post-traumatic devastation—with the ferocious anger, pain and almost cosmic stoicism—of two persons who suffered such anguish, but it also has an ambiguity that both hides and reveals.

The entire poem is unusual for Celan because of its strong, clear narrative line; we mostly understand readily the event of the dialogue. Its theme, the examination of one’s relationship to God after the horrendous events of “that,” gets more tangled the longer it is considered. Celan is full of fury, speaks of “your God,” speaks “against him,” and has a hope not for a reconciliation or explanation but a fight. He incites God to his “wrangling word,” maybe to have something as tangible as an argument to sustain his faith, in the absence of any possible acceptable account for what has happened. It is a righteous and utterly justified response.

The final two stanzas are striking. In contrast to Celan's rage, Sachs demurs, and the poem intimates that she sees a broader picture. Sachs' reply to Celan, almost 30 years her junior, is described coolly. The pause that she takes (“Your eye looked at me, looked away”) has the quality of the pause one takes to decide how to express a difficult truth to a someone who is obstructed from seeing it, in this case by anger. There is a suggestion of self-deprecation in Celan’s portrayal.

Prima-facie, Sachs’ response (“We/ really don’t know, you know/ we really don’t know/ what/ counts”) could be seen as the acceptance of our inability to comprehend the motives or will of God or God's actions, no matter what the magnitude of the occurrence. Though this is a prototype for human interactions with gods, here it manifests as a feat of faith and spiritual fortitude almost impossible to grasp given the currency, scale and barbarity of the circumstance, and implies a wisdom that is captured in the physical description of her response, one of remove and indirectness (“your mouth/ spoke toward the eye, I heard”).

A second reading is that because of "that" Sachs, and not Sachs alone presumably, has had a kind of inner compass crushed to the point that she feels it is not longer possible to make a moral judgment of God (or at all, at the extreme) that Celan imputes. How can one view the psychosis of genocide within the realm of ethics? Is a capacity for judgment evaporated or made seemingly absurd by such wanton violence? If this could happen, what is the point of making sense of anything? “What counts” has a sound of resignation beyond incomprehension in it.

A third possible reading, related to the first but more sweeping, is that Sachs is simply implying that one can't say anything at all about God, no matter what the subject or scale, full stop. The relationship to God is at the least indescribable and at the most opaque, yet meaningful. This approaches the domain of mystics; I have no idea how to talk about it, and don’t much trust those that claim to.

These readings (among potential others) are parallel and distinct, and maybe their agglomeration is the point. Celan told Sachs that he “hoped to be able to blaspheme up till the end.” (Felstiner, p. 156) Did Sachs’ reply focus Celan back to the struggle taking place within himself, that his anger of that moment eclipsed? Perhaps the poem uses the conversation to present the arguments within the self that occur simultaneously, and that it is the entwinement of these separate, difficult strains of thought and feeling that tell the real story, to which any rendering less ambiguous would have been unfaithful.

Of course one always wonders (or should), given distance and difference, of how the myopia of one’s ignorance muddles the picture. (I’m not Jewish, theist, deist, poet, literary scholar or persecuted, nor was I alive during the war.) And while it might be extravagant to request that Nelly (b. 1891) be here to enlighten us this evening, it wouldn’t be too much to ask that we could have Paul (b. 1920) to help. What we have is the living artifact of the poem.

I’m going to have a scotch. L’Chiam.

Coda

John Felstiner, who has been most gracious in our occasional correspondence over the years, has a new book out that deals with poetry and the environment, Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. You can hear an interview with him here.

Exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery

2009-09-24T10:38:00.005-04:00

Left to right: John Finneran, Untitled Night (with Three Eyes, One Mouth), 2009; Leeza Meksin, MKRS, 2009; Christopher Quirk, The Age of Reason, 2006

There are three paintings of mine in an exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery in New York through 31 October. I am very pleased to be showing with Leeza Meksin and John Finneran.

Provisional Painting

2009-07-09T15:51:00.011-04:00

Art in America online recently published an article by Raphael Rubinstein entitled “Provisional Painting.” (Accompanying slide show above; mouse over for artist/painting information.) It is well worth a read. The gist of the article is that some painters are deliberately adopting a desultory approach and slapdash methods as a way of avoiding the suffocating weight of the history and demands of Painting capital “P,” or as a way out of the theoretical cul-de-sac some see as painting’s current predicament. He brings about half a dozen painters of varying stripe under the rubric, surmises common causes for their modus operandi and provides historical examples of possible predecessors. He has this to say about the current condition:

What makes painting “impossible”? What makes “great” painting impossible? Perhaps it is a sense of belatedness, a conviction that an earlier generation or artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up...Impossibility can also be the result of the artist making excessive demands on the work, demands to which current practice has no reply.

Whether or not the artists Rubinstein examines would agree with his characterization of their motives or of the situation is an open question (though I think a good number of the artists he marshals do not support his thesis). However, it is noteworthy for Rubinstein, whose writing I always enjoy and who is a long-time champion of painters’ painters such as Norman Bluhm, Shirley Jaffe and Stanley Whitney, to thoroughly and sympathetically evaluate an approach to painting that in some instances seeks to make a virtue not just of dumpster-diving materials and techniques, which can be very useful, or of artistic restraint, but also of parsimony and at times contrived fecklessness. I won’t contest that this attitude exists, but it’s worth remembering that it’s not the only game in town.

Let’s look at two artists that lend support to Rubinstein’s thesis. Raoul De Keyser’s work, which I first saw at the Venice Biennale in 2007, is an instance of an argument being more persuasive than the artifact.

Raoul De Keyser, Blue Center, oil on canvas, 14” x 17” (36 cm x 44 cm), 2000. (Photo: Massimiliano Cadamuro, ASAC, La Biennale di Venezia)

Rubinstein quotes curator Jean-Charles Vergne, who says De Keyser’s work “constantly asserts the impossibility of painting free of touch-ups, mistakes, accidents, set on laying bare the seams, the second tries and the failures. . . . [There is] a constant stuttering in the painting.” Given this, it should have a high probability of being interesting, à la Beckett, but instead comes off as cloyingly fey. Transparent process alone won’t constitute a compelling painting.

Stefan Sandner’s work, I confess, I have only seen in reproduction, and while I make it a point not to write about artwork I have not seen in person, an exception here does no harm.

Stefan Sandner, Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 29 1/2 x 39 1/3 inches (75 cm x 100 cm), 2007. (Photo: Cherry and Martin)

Its reason for being is in large part to call attention to its own triviality, which in turn calls into question its reason for being, a self-fulfilling, scholastic vortex for which the painting itself becomes inconsequential in direct proportion to the time one spends considering it. Though a nifty trick of abnegation, this kind of painting doesn’t really evade the quandaries that provoke it, and provides little to the viewer.

While Rubinstein may be correct about some painters feeling boxed in by historical antecedents and theoretical conundrums, and while he praises the “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” perseverance of artists who paint through these challenges, painting remains an empirical discipline, a discipline of objects, rooted in the experience of making and viewing. However daunting the obstacles, the painting itself counts. The degree to which rhetoric displaces experience is the degree to which painting becomes eviscerated.

Every artist works, consciously or unconsciously, under the impact of the moment, the exigencies of time and place—that is obvious enough—but every moment is multi-faceted and no response to it pre-ordained. Rubinstein may have very well characterized one course of action, but there are plenty of other painters working contemporaneously who have simply never accepted the premises or anxiety Rubinstein relates. They sow an adjacent row in the same field, yet do not recognize (or never noticed) the confines of what is “possible in painting,” as dictated by those outside of it, nor any doctrinal requirement of exiguity. Work such as this is incontestable proof that present-day theoretical or historical ensnarement is less than a necessity. Perhaps Madame de Sévigné had the answer: “Quand je n’écoute que moi, je fais de merveilles.” [When I listen to myself only, I do wonders.]

Coda

I was in the studio recently and turned on Alfred Schnittke’s "Concerto Grosso No. 1," from the album “Kremer Plays Schnittke.” Froze me for twenty minutes. A-stound-ing. There’s even a tango in there (in the fifth movement). If anyone ever told him what wasn’t possible, he didn’t listen.

The meaning nebula

2009-06-09T11:14:00.005-04:00

(photo of Orion Nebula, taken by the Hubble telescope, courtesy of NASA)

At the moment I have a show up at BCB Art in Hudson, NY, one of the reasons for my bloggy torpor. I had quite a few compelling conversations with people about the paintings before, during and after the opening. Apart from anything specific about the work, the idea of meaning kept coming to mind. There were points of consensus and of disagreement regarding the paintings, but the main thing was that as I listened I could hear meaning being created by these viewers and interlocutors as they discussed things with me and each other. (I have talked about this before, but it was interesting to watch it happen again the other day.) The specificity, characteristics and impact of the paintings are inert until they hit a public. The artist may be the first viewer, but things don’t get interesting until someone else shows up to talk to. The viewers turn on the light switch and make the work visible. It shows meaning not as an entity but as a relationship, a dynamic, a network, or, perhaps, in the words of A. R. Ammons:

the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center
...
the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
no form of
formlessness

Optimism

2009-03-31T13:16:00.010-04:00

Turdus Migratorius, by Rick Leche

A brief follow up to a point in the last post about the logarithmic expansion of the territory called art. We attended a symposium entitled YES! The Persistence of Optimism at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College last weekend. Our very dear friend Hope Ginsburg was among the presenters and the chief allure for us, and spoke about her Sponge project, but all of the presentations were informative and several were quite compelling. (Follow this link for more information about the whole weekend of events.)

During the Q & A, I asked the panel how important their identity as artists and their association with the art world was to them, and if they thought they would be doing much the same thing if art did not exist or if they were not working under its aegis. I asked in part because many of the projects they undertook could have been classified easily under other disciplines or rubrics, for example sociology, mathematics, landscape architecture, and good old-fashioned activism, to name a few. On the other hand, I was wondering how much of this the artists would have come to, in the way they had, had they not approached it through art.

The answers varied. Oliver Herring, who does community-based improvisational pieces called Tasks, said, and I paraphrase, that he would be doing more or less the same thing, art or no art, saying he “looks for deficiencies” in society, and works to remedy them. From there the answers ranged back across the rest of the spectrum, all the way to "very important and couldn’t do it without art" on the opposite edge.

For a long time, art has been acting as a conduit to non-art activities as well as a consolidator. An artist may, for the purpose of an artistic goal, explore new, unknown to them, disciplines or activities to achieve it; an artist with diverse personal interests or passions may bring them into the art tent, as it were, and fashion them into a coherent piece. Without art, there is no space where a lot of these things could be mutually explored and synthesized in the same way. As a result, art has become the most vibrant laboratory for cross-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary studies, far out-stripping any academic or other alternative, hence its exploding appeal and protean (and sometimes exasperating) qualities.

One of the presentations we enjoyed most was by the self-declared “not artist” on the panel, Tod Lippy, the editor of Esopus, a fascinating, twice-yearly publication that includes an eclectic and thoroughly engaging variety of projects, portfolios and music. By all means have a look and subscribe. The issues are ridiculously cheap for such a thought-provoking and beautifully presented product.

Postulates

2009-03-12T14:33:00.004-04:00

(A 14th century manuscript of Euclid’s Elements, showing Proposition 29, the first to rely on the parallel postulate.)

1) What is the value in making a positive or negative case for expression, content or communication in art the first place? It is not in the least obligatory or even advisable for a painter or any other kind of artist to engage in these sorts of investigations as a basis or prerequisite for work. There are legions, perhaps a preponderance, of artists who work away happily without the slightest concern for any of this, and I wish to whatever deities that may populate the firmament that I were one of them. But along with my passion for painting has long resided a deep-seated skepticism about what painting is doing and how it operates that has both bedeviled and animated my work since I began. The resulting interest as an artist has been to ascertain what possibilities exist for painting, and how to sensibly proceed. Some of the writing here deals with that, and I am grateful for any assistance offered along the way.

2) That being said, an exhaustive analysis of the dynamics and manner in which we apprehend artworks would be a insuperable endeavor in search of a contemporary Sisyphus. Over the last 50 years or so, a primary focus of many artists has been to expand art’s dominion into countless fields of form and inquiry, which has been accomplished at an ever accelerated pace. As a result, the full range and manner of artworks and activities defies any but the vaguest characterization. The scope of art has become so broad, and the territory covered by the word “art” so vast, that the utility of the term has been curtailed as the set of things that are not art or could not be considered art approaches null. There really isn’t any object or activity involving human beings that can’t be considered art, and the simple proclamation that something is art preempts any contrary claim. Which is all well, of course, as no one is keen on sacrificing a liberty once won, and eventually the word “art” may be left behind completely and other ways to talk about these phenomena will arise, if it’s not happening already. I am most interested in looking at some examples from various genres as a point of departure, with painting, and a focus on abstract painting, the eventual destination.

3) The act of looking at art and paintings is of course an experiential and dynamic process. Anything canned or self contained—takeaways, in the current parlance—is anathema to art’s dexterity, which equips it to treat ambiguity and polyphony without compromise or reduction; examine unexplored interstices and marginalia to discover new connections and associations; give voice to nuance and embody the ephemeral; and, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, create new space for the viewer. Anne Carson makes an illuminating observation in her book, The Economy of the Unlost, beautifully demonstrating how poets can overcome limitations of language to bring into focus something beyond what language can manifest literally:

At the same time, Spirit does not arise of its own accord, but is wrested from behind the veil by an effort of language between I and Thou. The effort, as Simonides and Celan stage it, is very like a poetic act reaching right to the edge of ordinary babble, to the place where metaphor waits and naming occurs...it contains visibles and invisibles side by side, strangeness by strangeness. (p. 68)

Spirit itself cannot be represented, named, but can be interpolated by poetically framing its absence. In one of her examples, “If to you the terrible were terrible,” from a Simonides fragment, “babble” is laid into the symmetrical structure of the line to illustrate the gap in the perception, between the speaker and her sleeping infant, of a violent tempest, while also pointing to the invisibility of the tremendous event to the sleeper. (p. 58) What Simonides is showing to us here, according to Carson, is that “'if to you the invisible were visible, you would see God,’ but we do not see God.” The gap between the capacity of language and our aspiration for it—demarcated but not bridged—shows language failing in a primary sense, but succeeding by making invisibles visible, framing what cannot be directly seen. “We know [words] don’t count, but we lay them against the abyss anyway, because they are what mark it for us, contrafactually.” (p. 65)

As a conception of art or as an artwork lists toward the declarative statement, so its compass contracts in direct proportion. Art is exceptional among human pursuits in its capacity to work fruitfully with what cannot be declared.

Expression

2009-03-03T16:06:00.005-05:00

Igor Stravinsky said once that there is no such thing as expression. Samuel Beckett expressed his creative credo in 1949 as “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” Nothing new, then, about the idea that expression in the arts is suspect. At the same time, the presumption that the artist is communicating something is built into our language and thought, and hard to elude. We talk about “content,” “meaning,” “medium” and “message” of an artwork. Medium for what? What is being transmitted via the medium? Content? Ideas? Emotions? Where does it come from? The artist, obviously, no? Eliminate from consideration the hyper-rationalist notion that there is anything unadulterated—in terms of content, idea, what have you—that moves from artist to viewer via the artwork, the message in a bottle. Surely, though, illumination is at hand. If the artist is not telling us something, what is the point? Why do it and why look? How come I feel or think so when I see this particular painting, for example, and why do others feel or think similarly? Doesn’t this ratify that art is communication of some kind? But then what of the many differences in interpretation of works? A veritable Babel. One would not aver that competing interpretations are simply wrong, yet how can one call it communication when the response to the artist’s impetus is so varied? If one cannot track back through the work to some operating assumptions of the artist, how can there be expression? Maybe there is a more nuanced way of looking at it, less black and white. What if we talk about “feel” or “sensation,” rather than “content” or “communication,” can one capture the sense of the dynamic between artist, artwork and viewer, without getting tangled up in a philosophical Sargasso of artist intent and information transfer? On the other hand, either there is communication or there isn’t, right? And even if you describe it in more vaporous terms, there is still an implied connection to the intent of the artist, and thus communication? The artist did what they did so you would feel, more or less, the way you do. What if someone doesn’t “get it,” does that mean there are right and wrong responses to the work? Is the artwork itself the vehicle for the expression? If so, what happens when you pluck it out of its particular geographic or cultural sphere; doesn’t the interpretation vary wildly, and so how could the artwork be communicating anything? Mustn’t it then have much more to do with information in the artwork referencing things about which there is a preexisting cultural agreement within the sphere in question? Is that a problem, can’t it still be communication even if the artwork is reduced to a kind of semiotic matrix or forum? Do any of these questions actually produce contradictions? Does it matter? Should one just throw up one’s hand and get on with making art?

These are vexing questions to anyone who has examined them with the intention of clarifying their understanding of what occurs when art is made, viewed and processed, understood, discussed—complicated at times by the visceral aversion to erase one’s ego as an artist or, as a viewer, to confront the confounding miasma spawned by the realization that one’s response to an artwork is potentially ungrounded in the artwork itself, or in any intent of the artist, beyond the question of right or wrong interpretation.

Zero Hour Interview

2009-02-05T10:46:00.007-05:00

Here is a link to an interview I did with Tim Bowring on his radio program, Zero Hour, on WRIR in Richmond, in conjunction with my show at 1708 Gallery. Tim has done over 300 such interviews, documenting the arts and culture in Richmond.

The interview covers some issues that I address on the blog. You can listen to it here (mp3).

Air on the shoe string

2009-01-21T14:33:00.004-05:00

Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes, 1886

I am working on a couple of posts that expand on points mentioned in the last one, but they are not ready and I am trying to get back on schedule (both here and in the studio). So the posts will wait, but in recompense I offer three excerpts, held together by a shoestring...

“…work diligently from nature without saying to yourself beforehand ‘I want to do this or that.’ If you work as if you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupations, you will not always do well, but the days you least anticipate it you find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before us. You learn to know a country which is fundamentally quite different from its appearance at first sight.

“Contrariwise you say to yourself ‘I want to finish my pictures more, I want to do them with care,’ lots of ideas like that, confronted by the difficulties of weather and changing effects, are reduced to being impracticable, and I end by resigning myself and saying that it is the experience and meager work of every day which alone ripens in the long run and allows one to do things that are more complete and more true. Thus slow long work is the only way, and all ambition and resolve to make a good thing of it false.”

—Vincent Van Gogh, Letter from St. Rémy, mid-November 1889

“In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining.

“The nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work. But until now art presumably has had to do with the beautiful and beauty, and not with the truth. The arts that produce such works are called the beautiful or fine arts, in contrast with the applied or industrial arts that manufacture equipment. In fine art the art itself is not beautiful, but is called so because it produces the beautiful. Truth, in contrast, belongs to logic. Beauty, however, is reserved for aesthetics...

“But then, is it our opinion that this painting by Van Gogh depicts a pair of actually existing peasant shoes, and is a work of art because it does so successfully? Is it our opinion that the painting draws a likeness from something actual and transposes it into a product of artistic–production? By no means.”

—Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”

“—…That’s one of the causes: the lace. A thing whose name is, in French, also the name of a trap [le lacet: “snare”]. It does not only stand for what passes through the eyelets of shoes or corsets. Our voices, in this very place.

—I do indeed notice, now, that strange loop

—ready to strangle

—of the undone lace. The loop is open, more so still than the untied shoes, but after a sort of sketched-out knot

—it forms a circle at its end, an open circle, as though provisionally, ready to close, like pincers or a key ring. A leash. In the bottom right-hand corner where it faces, symmetrically, the signature “Vincent,’ in red and underlined. As though, on the other side, in the other corner, on the other edge, but symmetrically, (almost) on a level with it, it stood in place of the signature, as though it took the (empty, open) place of it…”

—Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting

The meaning of meaning

2009-01-16T14:48:00.007-05:00

Andrei Rublev, The Holy Trinity, c. 1410

Several years ago I came across an article that lamented the loss of meaning in painting. (I can’t track it down.) It occurred to me at the time that the problem was not that meaning had been removed from painting, but that it never had any.

The primary sense of the word meaning is that of definition—not fully appropriate to this case, but worth bearing in mind as the gloss of this use casts a monolithic shadow of literalism across our terrain. In art, meaning is generally used as a synonym for content. In this application, meaning is message; it is what the painting holds and delivers, what is “contained” by the painting and what is consumed. The painting becomes a bearer of information, information that is received and understood by the viewer. There is an appeal for something artist and viewer could point to as probative (regarding the value of the painting) and determinate. The presumptions here are prima facie untenable. “Art is not a telegram,” Lyotard once said. Meaning and content in this case imply something discrete, a quantum, something that can be deduced and set aside as fact. This closes the door on the complex of interactions that constitute the conversation of art in our moment, and even of prior moments, and reduces the potential of painting rather than securing its value.

There is a legitimate practical concern of ensuring that one’s activity as an artist is not…meaningless, nugatory, but assuming fixed coordinates for meaning is not effective, and also has a nostalgic timbre that ignores the entropic nature of art in our moment and the entropic impossibility of reversing course.

As an alternative, a conventional maxim one sometimes hears is “meaning is what happens,” which is fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t go very far. Posit further then that meaning does not reside in the body of the work but instead begins with the experience of the viewers; that the artist is the first viewer, and from there meaning accrues in incremental and polyphonic fashion in the public sphere; that there is nothing irreducible “contained” in the painting as object; that agreement on subject matter in the work comes from agreements reached outside the scope of the painting, though these may be employed by the artist (e.g. iconography).

When the “content” of a painting is evaporated, or found to be non-existent; if the painting is not a means of expression; if there is not consensus on the significance or purpose of a painting or artwork, what is left to the artist? What form can meaning take? Are alternatives necessary? Is this a kind of nihilism, or cause for optimism? If one accepts these propositions, what products or activities are sensible for painting, for art?

Coda

I’ve been dilatory with posting, mainly due to travel for much of the last three weeks. I returned this weekend, and had a radiant, amusing and perhaps not unrelated dream on Sunday night. Some friends and I were in a cathedral, and the interior was filled by the colored light of tall stained glass windows. A friend asked me something and I replied, “Stained glass was the conceptual art of the 12th century.” It had something to do with the divine figures portrayed in the glass being manifested as bodies of tinted light inside the cathedral.

“L’artista è la controfigura per il filosofo”

2008-12-17T20:23:00.008-05:00

(“The artist is the stuntman for the philosopher”–G. Baruchello)

The issue of what is happening when we look at an artwork, and how to talk about the dynamic between the making of an artwork, the artwork itself, and viewing, is something I have thought about a great deal and will write about. In deciding how to begin I realized that, at least on this topic, a little background on why this matters to my work, in more than a philosophical sense, might be useful.

Several years ago I went through a pretty thorough evaluation of where I was with painting. The examination was triggered by some moving events during the prior year. I had become interested in visual art and begun painting because art seemed to me a boundless vessel for working with the widest variety of human interests—a thing that could accept whatever one put into it and that one could never exhaust. I had, however, begun to feel that the events and concerns that were of highest import to me were alien to the paintings I was doing, which was not acceptable. Pushing paint around aimlessly, without deeper impetus or aim, did not interest me.

As a result I decided to halt painting, perhaps completely, while I looked into how, or whether, painting could do what I asked of it. If art, or painting, was not fulfilling the obligation that I had for it, if I was not fulfilling my obligation to it, it was better to leave it behind and search elsewhere for that fulfillment. It wasn’t clear to me where I would end up—as an activist, in a day job of some sort, law school, in a monastery, back in the studio—but I was content to leave it open for as long as it took to arrive at an organic decision. While sanguine, I was not going to return to the studio unless I was able to find a way to make the work and activity relevant to the things I cared about most. I found that my identity as an artist was not important to me, and told Amy at the time that the only thing I wasn’t ready to give up was breathing.

It took about three months, and the intervention of a transformative retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work on paper, to resolve, and of course it did so in an unforeseen way. Soon after seeing the exhibition the subliminal started oozing up from between the cracks. I found myself scribbling on scraps of paper, doodling over my notes. Externally, the more I considered it, the more the whole question looked twofold. On one side was a problem of the language we use to describe what happens when we make and look at art. Words like “expression,” “content,” “meaning” and even “medium” conjured, explicitly or implicitly, some kind of transfer of information, for which I could find no justification in the dynamic between artist/artwork/viewer, and which is completely outside of the way we understand art in our moment, for good reasons. On the other side was the presumption of any correlation between what the artist does and what the viewer takes away. If one dispensed with that, lots of problems went with it, though others appeared.

What finally presented itself was an equilibrium between impossibility and new possibility. The above points indicated that what I had been seeking could not be done. On the other side of the balance, however, these seemingly negative conclusions had opened up a lot of new space. If there were contradictions embedded in going back to work, these contradictions seemed capable of bearing some unfamiliar fruit.

Coda

1) Article on David Hammons in Alexandria. I will never forget a walk through Harlem he took us on years ago, at the behest of Stanley Whitney. Among other things that day, he helped me pay attention to the artifacts and interactions of public spaces with the same devotion I was giving to visual phenomena. You’ll find the same acuity and precision in this article.

2) Judit Reigl at Janos Gat. Some very tough paintings from the 1960s. Sort of like the love child of Umberto Boccioni and Clyfford Still, if you can imagine anything that irascible not self-destructing on impact.

3) Dona Nelson’s painting at Thomas Erben. A complex, though-provoking and lovely painting. She uses the back of the canvas in a resolved and innovative way that opens into notions of duality. Very daring. Dona always has one foot on a banana peel and the other on a skateboard. (As of posting, the Thomas Erben website is not updated, but the exhibition runs through 1 February.)

The films of Nathaniel Dorsky 2

2008-12-10T11:29:00.006-05:00

I’d like to focus on some recurring qualities in Dorsky’s films that keep the mind engaged and in play in ways that are similar to Robert Irwin’s work. The examples come from four of the more recent films: Variations, The Visitation, Threnody and Song and Solitude.

One way the films lure us in is simply visual lushness. He loves pattern and textiles, and often highlights them. One section particularly, from Variations, is a whole sequence on men’s sport coats—plaids, stripes, etc—seen close enough that they pattern the frame and interact with each other. He also finds surprising and compelling images in everyday things, such as a doorbell or even a cigarette butt. Some images recur. He loves hands, for instance, and photographs them with reverence. It could be a man’s hands at a diner table, or a woman’s hand arranging jewelry in a shop window. He lingers over them, and gives us time to see really how amazing they are.

At times, though, we cannot understand or contextualize the image, at least not for a while. This disorientation also engages us, and maintains our participation in the film. He uses a lot of “all-over” shots, shots where the entire frame is occupied by a consistent or repetitive image, such as leaves, sand or, as mentioned, pattern. Other shots have surprising endings: a frame full of broad, vertical, unreadable forms, the shot tilts up slowly, until, after several seconds, we see…shower curtain rings. Dislocations like this have the impact of awakening our context-seeking faculties while frustrating our ability to lock in on the image and move on, go elsewhere mentally. We are presented with something we can’t recognize or categorize. We immediately seek references to place it—location, size, scale, time of day, anything—but these landmarks are not provided. Another penchant he has is for reflected images, which by their nature defy quick comprehension. He shoots into store windows and auto glass, often creating multiple reflections and layers. The depth of these images is remarkable, as complex and layered as I have ever seen in film. Given the frequency of this motif, it would be worthwhile to do a deeper examination of them.

There is more to say on Dorsky, particularly about the participatory nature of his films, his editing, and how this lines up with certain ideas about content, but too much for the space I allot myself today, so I’d like to substitute this wonderful, and perhaps tangentially related story, from Peter Greenaway’s documentary on John Cage. As this is from memory, please pardon transcription errors. In the film, Cage is recounting a conversation he had after a performance with an audience member. Soon after the performance had begun, the audience member became furious with it, stormed out of the hall and drove home in a rage. As he pulled into his garage, he thought, no, this is wrong, so he drove back to the hall and ran inside, but the performance was over, so he finds Cage backstage and tells him all this and says: “Oh, I am so sorry, because now it’s all over and I have missed everything.” “No, no!," Cage says, "That’s OK, that was all part of it!”

Some thoughts on Irwin's "Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue3"

2008-12-03T10:06:00.005-05:00

As I mentioned in the prior post, something I found noteworthy in viewing Dorsky’s films was the heightening of the sense of perception, awareness and attentiveness, and how that persisted beyond the darkness of the theater. It put me in mind of what occurred during and after seeing Robert Irwin’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue³ at Pace in New York on a nasty February day in 2007.

The complex visual qualities of that work were manifold and have been well documented elsewhere (here and here, for example). One quality that was less analyzed was one’s attention to others in the gallery, and how the viewing was actually better and more engaging when there were other people in the room.

It began as one registered the range of behaviors of other visitors, a commonplace for looking at art in public. A fellow in a windbreaker, still shivering from the chill and shock of the almost horizontal winter rain, eyes adjusting, not yet able to focus on that which he came to see, ambled idly around the perimeter, just beginning to size up the thing that will either provoke a sophisticated sensory experience or a brisk withdrawal, the pointless drenching to be recounted to colleagues in exasperated tones later over a restorative bourbon, perhaps. Conversations, as a pair orbits the gallery together and compares observations. A blithely executed 180 degree spin and exit.

Then, as one stared down (or up) into the highly reflective rectangles, the specters of the other viewers entered the tinted fields and became part of the artwork; their movements enlivened the static world of the mirroring panels. Despite being just across from you, the illusions of these persons was magnetic enough to draw you into a compelling counter-reality. They strolled through glassy chambers that appeared to be more than 20 feet below the level of the floor, while their perfectly audible comments seemed incommensurate with the visual distortion.

Disjunctions such as this sharpened one’s attention. The other viewers’ presence added an extra dimension to the--already dense--experience of the work, a dimension unavailable to a lone viewer. They spurred and expanded one’s own perceptual and interpretive apprehension as they pursued their own. This dynamic in an artwork is rare if not unique.

The enhanced attentiveness that occurred with Red, Yellow and Blue³ was duplicated while watching Dorsky’s films. I recall how disappointed I felt if my mind wandered, how I felt that I was cheating myself, partly for not being in the now, and partly for missing a spectacular shot. The acuity cultivated in the experience of these artworks carries over into the street, onto the bus and into other activities and thoughts.

Well, so what?

Well, from an artistic point of view works like this operate as a kind of gift, one that brings us back to ourselves, into the moment and not elsewhere, abjuring monophonic message, and turning the art experience over to us. This is not common. It is a result, self-consciously in Irwin’s case, at least, of focusing on keeping the viewer participating and active. This initiative begins to take apart the notion of “content” in art. This is a notion that can cause a lot of confusion, even in cases where its possibility may be explicitly repudiated.

From a personal point of view, these works tacitly ask questions about how one conducts one’s life, both in the macro and micro view, which always carries the possibility of inciting pretty lively meditation and dialogue.

The films of Nathaniel Dorsky 1

2008-11-26T17:30:00.009-05:00

The first thing, and perhaps only thing, one needs to know about Nathaniel Dorsky’s films is that they are ravishing. I had the pleasure of seeing them this summer for the first time, thanks to the generous agency of Charles Silver at MOMA. I only recently found out about Dorsky via this wonderful article by P. Adams Sitney in Artforum last winter. Amy saw it first and passed it over to me saying “you might be interested in this,” which I think she knew would be a gross understatement. This summer, I was able to see eight of his films over two afternoon sessions, four of them several times. They need to be seen more than once, and like any worthwhile work of art the films continue to give, change and challenge with repeated examination.

The second thing to know about his films is that they are silent. This is disorienting at first, but unlike other aspects of his films that continue to disorient, one ceases to note the silence after a short period. The silence leaves more mental space for the visual, and for the processing of questions, many syntactical, that arise during the viewing, but more on that later.

The third thing worth knowing is that the films are projected at 18 frames per second. It is an extremely fine difference, unrelated to object motion within the frame, but my sense is that this speed combines with the silence to create an atmosphere of measured majesty, subtly reifying the activities of persons, nature and machines, in concord with other aspects of Dorsky’s films that make us aware of our perceiving state by challenging our apprehension. More on this later as well.

One of the first challenges the films present is to ask us to see the world in a manner that takes us out of our quotidian myopia. To see through Dorsky’s lens is to see the incalculable visual richness that surrounds us, a richness we seldom have either the time or inclination to explore. One of the most memorable shots (from Song and Solitude, 2006) is a close up of a simple metal pull-chain from an overhead lamp. As it twists gently back and forth, the glare off the tiny globes of the chain blink on and off like a row of marquee lights. The shot lasts just a few seconds. The unpromising banality of the subject in combination with the pyrotechnic effect of the string of lights produce a disjunction that renders risible the frequent paucity of our perceptive world. (Another shot, from Variations, 1998, that of a plastic bag lolling in circles in the breeze, was surely the model for the similar, most memorable shot in American Beauty.)

This visual generosity would be reward enough in a film, but of course there are broader ramifications. What one does with this awareness is important—how the viewer participates and changes. A primary tenet of Robert Irwin’s work is the idea of the artist making the viewer aware of their own perception. This awareness carries over beyond the viewing experience, and can change not just the way we see but the way we think. I’ll continue with this later, and follow up on some other things begun, but at the start I’m deliberately limiting the length of posts, in recognition of readers’ internet proclivities and my own preference to build this project slowly.