Gratitude

Jean-François Lyotard 
©Bracha Ettinger, 2005

I never met Jean-François Lyotard, though I would have loved to. A friend of mine studied with him at the graduate program at UC Irvine and told me a few winning stories. One was from a party, where Lyotard arrived in splendid style, sporting a Colombo-worthy trench coat, a surgically-attached Galois, and two bottles of bourbon—one for the party and one for himself.

Lyotard’s writing is remarkable to me in that despite its pessimistic mien, a side effect of examining politics and the state of culture, the backbone of his work is human compassion. You don’t get that impression from very many other contemporary theorists, despite that being––by inference––the purpose of the undertaking. Maybe the work is just too bleak.

Another person whose work has been important to me, Robert Irwin, I met very briefly at an opening for one of his shows at the (woefully) now-defunct Dia Foundation galleries in New York. I had glimpsed him in the galleries but departed, and was already in the car to leave when I abruptly asked Amy to wait for a moment and ran back in. He was chatting with a small group inside the installation and I butted in, quickly thanked him for his work, and skittered out.

Robert Irwin
, Excursus: Homage to the Square³ 1998. 
Installed at the Dia Center for the Arts 
©Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society, New York

While in graduate school at the Tyler School of Art, Raphael Rubinstein gave a talk on the paintings of Norman Bluhm, whom I had never heard of. That was a good day. Not long after that I went to Ace Gallery in Tribeca with a couple fellow grad students and asked if they had any of Bluhm's paintings that we could see. The dealer, perhaps bemused by my cheek, led us into a back room and showed us some ecstatic, gargantuan pieces, just off the truck and leaning against the walls. That was an even better day. A year or so later Stanley Whitney was in my studio and noticed some reproductions of Bluhm’s work on the wall and said I should go visit him up in Vermont. I replied that I thought people moved to Vermont to get away from people like me. Bluhm died the next year, and I regretted never at least sending him a letter. His wife invited Amy and I up to visit his studio a few years ago to see his paintings there. That was a phenomenal day.

Untitled, 1978, acrylic and pastel on paper mounted on canvas. Photo Jareld Melberg Gallery

Because he was gone before I knew who he was, I couldn’t thank my all-time blues favorite, Hound Dog Taylor, who played with irresistible energy. One summer I occasionally saw Brewer Phillips––Hound Dog’s right hand man, who could tear off an incendiary lead himself––high-kicking at Maxwell Street market in Chicago on Sunday mornings in the 80s. His group played across the street from us (I was one of the roving band of roustabouts who backed Little Pat Rushing there over the years), and I should have gone over on a break and said hello at some point but didn’t. Phillips died in 1999.

Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1974

It may seem trite, and humility is too often viewed as a pitiful defect these days, but I feel an obligation to thank people who have done great work that is important to me. They might not know otherwise, and that’s a worse consequence than making an ass of myself. 

"The life of a writer is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward." --Jorge Luis Borges

Though nearby in spirit (and also geographically for some periods, in southern California), I don’t think Irwin and Lyotard ever met, but they would have had a few things to talk about. Irwin’s examinations of perception, and his analysis that between raw perception and recognition (of a traffic sign, for instance) we lose both information and engagement, led him to put experience at the center of his work, renounce painting along with presumptions of content, and create art and spaces that are perceptually both precise and ambiguous.

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue (installation view), 2006-07
 polyurethane paint over lacquer on aircraft honeycomb aluminum
 24 panels: 132 1/2 x 96 1/2 inches (3.4 x 2.4 m) each; 12 panels:
132 1/2 x 48 1/4 inches (3.4 x 1.2 m) each; overall installation dimensions variable
Photography by Philipp Scholz Rittermann
 ©Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society, New York

Irwin’s work keeps the viewer in a kind of suspension; it’s often hard to resolve what you are seeing easily, or there may be a jarringly dislocating visual experience that sharpens your awareness of the moment. I have always felt because of this that his work has an essentially ethical foundation; I don’t think Irwin would agree but in any case it’s a topic for another time. (I actually think all art has an ethical foundation in terms of what is assumed when you decide to engage the creative process, though I don’t mean that in the moralizing, prescriptive way that makes some people go DEFCON 2, simply that ethics is a natural, intrinsic aspect of living and begins with your relationship to yourself. But that's a topic for another day too.)

For Lyotard, in essays such as “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics” and “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable,” in The Inhuman, the suspension of resolution is equally important, though for somewhat different reasons. Reviewing Kant’s analysis of the sublime, Lyotard focuses on a moment out of time that happens when we are presented with a perception that does not correspond with the forms and structures that fit our prior experience––like the timbre of a strange musical instrument––or in the case of the sublime overwhelms them––like an immense and terrifying storm. If you've ever seen the sky turn green, you'll know what I mean.

More broadly the essays take on the state of aesthetics and its place within the contemporary political/technological milieu. In the book, he is despondent about art’s chances in the face of these forces, but preserves hope for a practice of art that persists by inhabiting the gaps of both society and perception, and creating a different kind of avant-garde (maybe more of a philosophical/artistic resistance) by working outside the cultural demands placed on it by not just the capitalistic but also the academic establishment. It’s an unusual position. And a very useful one.

Thanks.

Coda

This album cover is from Amy’s collection. She purchased it at a rummage sale years ago; it was released in 1953. We pulled it off the shelf awhile back and realized that the painting is by Robert Irwin. He is described on the back cover as a young up-and-comer. I guess so. There is also a quote from the artist: He likes Chet Baker because he always leaves something essential out. 1953. It’s a fine album, too.

The films of Nathaniel Dorsky 2

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"

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

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.