St. Lucy's Day

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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.