The Show goes on. Schnabel (fils) Walter Robinson and the end of Zombie Formalism

It had all become a wonderfully seamless merger of theory and the art it purported to define. Modernism divided by modernism, became postmodern, became Zombie Formalism. The last remnant of self-consciousness was squeezed out. The image was often produced by machines or was so redundant of past Modernism, any notions of the authority or authenticity of the creator had exited the site of creation. Heidegger’s "monstrous philosophical site", where he crosses out Being (sous rature) bringing an end to ontology or at most establishing a weak ontology, had worked its way into the creative process of contemporary artists. Has Simone Weil’s cyclical trope of history hit the nadir of meaninglessness and instead of bouncing in another direction became an intensification of itself?This aesthetic nothing is not totally nothing as the market gives it significant monetary value. The correlation between such art and an economy built on zero interest rates was hard to ignore. Calculating bankers needed to launder some of their gains from the phony stock market into Culture, but the avant-garde instead of providing the usual opportunity for the bankers to slum or dabble with artists besotted of Freud or Jung was now populated by artists as savvy in their business acumen as the bankers themselves. The artists just printed more paintings on their inkjet printers to be bought up by the stockbrokers who had gotten rich on the Federal Reserve's money printing. The dialectic of history provided no zigzag, no way out just more zombification ad infinitum.

Mark Grotjahn

 

Frank Stella

This state of affairs was foretold in the early work of Frank Stella. His work was not built out of the cosmic gestures of the Jungian Pollock or the labor of the working class of de Kooning but out of color aid packs and bad geometry. Whereas Stella felt some remorse over putting painting into such a straight jacket and has spent the rest of his career paying homage to the Italian Baroque, the Zombie Formalists, Guyton, Grotjahn, Morris et. alia look like early Stella. They saw the scission his palette provided from flesh, blood and the inner life as a good ground upon which to build their bloodless zombie edifice. It did not refer back to a lived world but to the artifice of graphic design.

Jasper Johns by Karsh

Modernism was the last breath of authoritative self-consciousness grounded in Science, the individual as capable of solid perceptions of the Real. When one reads that Husserl’s eidetic reduction seizes reality as it is captured by the senses, one understands that this is what Rothko did. I was reminded of his spiritual intensity in Paul Rodgers “the Modern Aesthetic” which sees Modernism as an ever-revivified battle against the Prussian state and its reincarnations. For sure the scientific community achieved its goals with a group effort but judging from the mid century portraits of greatness by Yousef Karsh, the consciousness of the truth was a private affair. So here is a definition you can take home: zombie modernism is modernism without the authoritative stance of self-consciousness. There is no one home.

 

Jennifer Guidi

So when I learned that Grotjahn’s wife, Jennifer Guidi was cranking out sentimental paintings swimming in sunset colors and that the same collectors of Zombie art could not get enough of them, I was startled. Is this the long awaited bounce? Is all the sentiment excised from Zombie Formalism coming back to start the new zag to zombies zig? Granted the “zombie stance” if it were a yoga pose would be an impossible pose to hold. It requires a coolness and poise lest even an iota of emotion leaks in. You would have to stop breathing. Grotjahn started to drip a little paint on his geometry but that may have expressed an indifference to any remnant of authority in his work. But it may have been the crack in the dam. Are the images of Guidi ironic?  Are these just painterly renditions of Koons. 

 

Walter Robinson

The truth may lie in a show of Walter Robinson‘s painting curated by Vito Schnabel in Switzerland. Vito is the scion of the Schnabel family, founded by papa Julian. Robinson, the presumed inventor of the label of Zombie Formalism (although I came up with the label several months earlier as Zombie abstraction) and a denizen of New York’s art ghetto whom artist/art critic Charles Giuliano described as a “known grifter and blowhard” in an article in “Berkshire Fine Arts”, has produced a body of work which to my eye purports to be a painterly version of Lichtenstein’s pop oeuvre.  An article in Blouin Fine Arts pushes it as the glorification of “appetite” in American culture. I get it: remove the cool veneer of the billboard or the movie poster and replace it with the juicy strokes of Robinson and you reveal the appetitive underbelly of American society. Julian’s work was resurrected as provisional in the new millennium by Raphael Rubinstein from its 80’s identity as neo-expression. Schnabel’s art like Robinson’s always needs some sort of label. The Schnabel label unlike LV won't cut it by itself. Pull off the label and the work looks like shit.

On occasion I come across articles about the New York Federal Reserve’s involvement in money printing or as they call it: quantitative easing. It appears they don’t know what the longterm effect is: they are just winging it. It has created a bubble that is going to burst, that has enriched the 1% at the expense of Main St. I think you could say the same thing about the artistic culture of New York.  If Schnabel pere et fils , Walter Robinson and now Jennifer Guidi are what we must bow down  to as the culture of choice by New York’s collectors then there is no bounce nor an intensification of nihilism, just an untidy, murky pool of schlock. Is this a bubble ready to burst?  Or maybe just a backup of primordial sludge that will give rise to a new art?

Paul Rodgers: "Modern Aesthetic"

Some years ago I wrote about an historical representation of Coney Island at the Brooklyn Museum of Art together with a performance at BAM of “The Glory of the World” on the life of Thomas Merton. Since both were attended by me back to back the same day, my mind was bothered to find a correlation between what appeared at first glance to be two incommensurable events randomly experienced side by side. The first connection came to the surface with the recollection of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s book of poems: ”The Coney Island of the Mind”. The title I subsequently learned was extracted from a book by Henry Miller; a rather superficial connection at face value of the Brooklynite Miller with the Brooklyn location of Coney Island and the theatrical performance taking place in Brooklyn. I mistakenly thought that the use of Miller’s phrase by Ferlinghetti embodied a positive correlation between his Miller’s consciousness and Coney Island, an embrace of the Barnum and Bailey aspect of the American experience: But the paragraph from which the phrase is taken, if read in full, showed Miller’s horror that our mind could be colonized by so much glitz and honky tonk. I had read a good deal of Miller in college and found his books a healthy romantic antidote to the hard nosed practicality of American academia and in particular the rank careerism of graduate school. Miller found a soulfullness in the squalor of Depression era Paris, which, somehow, was missing in the harsh workaday pragmatic culture of New York City. Ultimately, it was Miller’s European connection  that brought the play and Coney Island in some cognitive proximity. Thomas Merton’s father, an artist, had run away from America to France to pursue his artistic ambitions and it is where Merton grew up. I believe Merton’s conversion to Catholicism, was a return to Europe as a metaphysical realm. Miller was also after a transcendental meaning to his life that he found in sexuality: a private Eros to counteract the mass display of the erotic of Coney Island. Strangely enough “The Glory of the World” placed Merton’s inner spiritual life  under constant assault by the mass Dionysian impulse of our contemporary culture that was the essence of the old Coney Island.

WeeGee photo of ConeyIsland

Suddenly, I am at the seashore and no recollection of the train stopping. Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard -- a Coney Island of the mind. The amusement shacks are running full blast, the shelves full of chinaware and dolls stuffed with straw and alarm clocks and spittoons. Over it all, in a muffled roar, comes the steady hiss and boom of the breakers. Behind the pasteboard street front, the breakers are plowing up the night with luminous argent teeth. In the oceanic night, Steeplechase looks like a wintry beard.
Everything is sliding and crumbling. Everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters. Everything is a lie, a fake, pasteboard. Everything is made of nuts and bolts. The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench, sovereign pasteboard power.(Henry Miller)

In researching Miller I found a reference to his admiration for Spengler’s "Decline of the West". Spengler’s gloom and doom seems to hover around the periphery of his vision of Coney Island.

James Turrell

Last weekend on the occasion of the birthday of my daughter, who lives in the Berkshires, we went to Mass MoCA. My son who accompanied us wanted a space where his son could run around and be entertained.  My request to go to the Clark Institute would not have satisfied that requirement as its solemnity would have weighed too heavily on a rambunctious two year old. Indeed, it turned out to be a great place for a toddler,  a Coney Island of Contemporary arts.  Every show seemed to dissolve the space between the self and the masses who were spending their Sunday there.  Whether it is Turrell’s illuminated projections of Rothko or Nick Cave’s enormous installation of lawn ornaments the message is the same(although the hidden images of guns in Cave’s work attempt a deeper message of racial violence that couldn’t quite subvert  the carnival of colors): the trip to a museum no longer provides an opportunity for meditation on works that open up inner realms of meaning but one of entertainment where the subject(viewer) and the object(art) are mediated into the same space. The number and variety of things to see are hard to keep track of, which creates the mood of a three-ring circus. Now that Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus is gone, MoCA and the White House fill in the void.

Author with grandson in Rauschenberg installation

A small show of Rauschenberg’s painted phone booths(shower stalls or convention kiosks?) actually looked kind of mid-century kitsch that is all the rage in contemporary design, a Laurie Anderson show I missed as well as a quasi-permanent exhibition of Anselm Kiefer that I also missed. There was a totally clever but fatuous exhibition of someone who went out to meet and photograph all her “friends” on FB; a photographer's pseudo-deep analysis playing Facebook  media off of “face to face” media. What captured the essence of the dissolving of self and object was the collection of homemade instruments made by the late music professor at Bennington and his Students Gunnard Schonbeck. You could play them and somehow the cacophony of atonality and percussion created by random visitors playing the instruments resulted in a sort of avant-garde symphony. Unlike at the country fair there was no opportunity yet to make your own swirly painting. I find it interesting that much of the literature online written about the museum addresses attendance. The verdict is that the funky carney product does a good job of drawing the crowds.

 

Sarah Braman

The painting on show was more often painted sculpture but shown along side of straight painting so as to give the sense that the work transgressively could have gone either way from painting to sculpture or back again. One painting for example was made of corrugated metal that had arbitrary colors splashed on it. The metal’s nature, as being used in the physical world in construction yet being hung on the wall to be observed, had a deadening effect on this viewer, who wished to be transported by the painting but it repelled his gaze: A deadening of desire.  The deconstruction of painting somehow is ever resurrected as a valid pursuit with each new generation taking on the garb of the critical theory revolutionary. One piece, a long painted tunnel with its interior splashed with paint, was a painting outside/in. My grandson found it a lot of fun, but truth be told a tunnel of horrors at a carnival would be a more exciting experience.

Nick Cave

I can hear the critics, similar to those who left comments on my zombie formalism blog that I was just a fuddy-duddy, someone showing his age as the art world passes him by. The crowds seemed happy. I was especially happy at the brewpub strategically situated at the exit.

I had some hope for the future of painting when I received in the mail a self-published book by Paul Rodgers owner of the eponymous  gallery in Chelsea.  It is entitled “The Modern Aesthetic “. A visit to his exhibits of Marioni and Hantai in  Chelsea always provided a sympathetic respite from the contemporary scene and its grotesqueries. The book manifests how deeply he has thought about the role of painting in the contemporary scene and is ambitious ,to say the least, in its delineation of a path for Modernism starting with Gericault and ending with Hantai, with Courbet, Manet,  Newman, Rothko and Pollock along for the ride. He does a good job contextualizing the aforementioned artists into their navigation of the increasingly socialized power structures that dictate what can and cannot be experienced by the populace. The artist from Rodgers’ point of view is always in an adversarial stance in relation to society. Rodgers’ bias is toward the French manifestation of Modernism, which gained energy by challenging the rigid political structure of the French State. His commentary on Gericault’s “The Charging Chasseur” describes an artist attempting to isolate the experience of war in terms of the individual not of the group following the ideology of the leader: the raw terror of the horse and soldier in the midst of battle. His experience is defined by the role he has to play in battle but as something personally suffered. “The Raft of the Medusa” tells the same story of a group of individuals each in their own way dealing with the card that fate has handed them, probably led on some fantastical voyage by an ideological Ahab.

Courbet achieves the same goal of self-assertion of the private experience in challenging the structure of the Bourgeoisie, whether in “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” where he insists on his importance as a citizen or the magic of the countryside of his native land, which he claims as his terrain, his source emotionally, as much an origin as his famous, “The Origin of the World”.

Manet paints the public events where the rich and powerful  signaled their importance but turns these media events on their head to reveal that what is really going on socially is the buying and selling of flesh. This is something I commented on in the work of John Singer Sargent. The signaling of power and social rank was achieved by feigning the clothing and demeanor of social positions taken from the aristocracy prior to the modern era but in Sargent’s case they are not critiqued. I am not convinced that  Manet leads to Pollock, Newman, Rothko or Hantai but rather Warhol who is the artist of a ruling class already mediated by mass media.

Rodgers describes the triumvirate of Pollock, Rothko and Newman, as being in  rebellion against the status quo achieved by a turn inward toward the metaphysical ,which is attained in the case of Pollock via psychoanalysis. The origins of that metaphysical turn are, he believes, situated in Baudelaire’s description of a modern self, angst ridden and alone shorn of the spiritual depths of religion. He goes to great lengths to belittle Baudelaire’s admiration for Delacroix which is a grave mistake as the link from the 19thc to his 20thc artists is probably Delacroix not the poet Baudelaire who could paint in a realist style with political subject matter as in “Liberty Leading the People" but also in a more moody metaphysical style as in "The Death of Sardanapalus" .  It is an embodiment of the mood of boredom(l’ennui) so important to Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal”. A later work “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”,  has an existential theme of decision that anticipates the angst ridden work of Abstract Expressionism. I would love to know what Rothko with his Jewish roots thought of this painting and Delacroix in general.

 

Delacroix "The Death of Sardanapalus"

Rodgers makes claims about the essentialist structure of Newman’s work. There is the accompanying contrasting to Mondrian whose work is correctly described as based more in a positivist scientific tradition where abstraction evolves out of observation of the real world. Like so much abstraction it has its sources in Husserl’s eidetic reductions where visual structures are isolated as they are experienced in the brain. This has lead to the kind of cognitive science ,where for example our notions of being vertical beings are shaped by a part of the brain dedicated to verticality or uprightness. Newman’s use of the vertical is not some essence existing beyond Plato’s cave in the empyrean. I think that it is just this connection with the eye/mind that makes Newman’s work such a powerful presence when experienced in a gallery. The lines on the canvas line up with the inner lines of our consciousness.

The long and winding road of Modernism culminates in the work of Hantai. I admit I was only vaguely cognizant of his work, so I had to take the gallerist’s words on Hantai’s process of painting as true and accurate.  The picture Rodgers paints of Hantai leads me to believe that Hantai’s painting might be seminal of much of late 20thc and early 21st century painting if there can be proved an influence on Ellsworth Kelley. Rodgers’ case of Pollock’s influence on Hantai is based on the notion that the physical relationship of Pollock to his canvas changes when he puts the canvas on the floor and places himself above it. Hantai then puts himself in the painting by folding up the canvas and painting on top of the folded work, which is subsequently unfolded and hung on the wall. This manipulation of the ground seems to be his goal. No figure; just ground. Or then ground becoming figure. This undoing of the ground as support for the image is pursued in Kelly’s late plywood work without color, abandoning the last remnant of color optics.

Also a case could be made that the overall patterns of the Tabula series where figure and ground disappear in the grid-like structure of the work anticipate Richter’s overall squeegee work, which abandons figure/ground and any remnant of parts/whole.

Hantai

 

Paul de Man the notorious deconstructionist liked to point out how thinkers in the course of an essay will end up making points that support a view opposite to what they intended. This seems to be the case in part in the “Modern Aesthetic”. Hegel is presented on several occasions as the “bête-noire” of Rodgers’ central artists. He represents everything that Rodgers’ heroes struggle against. They are anti-Hegelians influenced by Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. Either overtly or by glorifying the private self, they struggle over against the State or status quo. I think that this premise works well for most of the artists except, oddly enough, it fails to capture Hantai’s aesthetic. Hegel’s famous dictum that “All that is real is rational and all that is rational is real.” came to mind, when I read about the process of Hantai's work. Hegel’s thinking embeds the metaphysical in the physical. From a political point of view it is the foundation of the Hegelian dialectic where the individual achieves its individuality only as a part of the idea of the state. From a purely analytical view it dissolves the physicality of the world into pure idea. Is not Hantai doing that when he takes what would have been the ground of the painting, so that it no longer functions as physical support for the painting but is figure and ground at the same time. Is it pure materiality or pure idea? Nature as phusis or the metaphysical as “nothing” are squeezed out as possibilities for the painting as it folds and unfolds itself into pure idea/materiality. There is thus nothing that is un-thought, or "let be"(gelassenheit) two concepts very important to Heidegger in his attempt to create a new metaphysics.  It would be pure physicality save for the grid but the grid is a” weak” thought as popularized by Vatimmo.  Could Hantai also be the precursor of provisional painting?

P.S.

My take on the creation of the Modernist Aesthetic focuses on the exploration of visual cognition.Or zen might allow for the unthought to take hold

Rauschenberg's Retrospective at MoMA

The Rauschenberg retrospective on the scale of the Stella show that closed last year is on its way to New York. I am wary of any attempt to see this exhibit, since my visit to the Stella retrospective at the Whiney in 2016 got my car towed with a hefty ransom to get it back. The dichotomy of the physical world where an object (my car) violates very real traffic laws because it interferes with the flow of traffic (a very real concern in NYC) and the museum show of an artist’s flights of  fancy troubles me and got me thinking about the disconnect between truth and art. So I will not risk my car in New York and, since I already have a feel for for the show from comments by the Abstract Critical  followers on Twitter in England ,where Rauschenberg's work was on exhibit at the Tate, and now by a review of that same show by Jed Perl in the New York Review of Books, I will risk  some opinions on Rauschenberg's oeuvre without the whole package in front of me.

Rauschenberg

I mention my real car and real laws of the outside world as this has some resonance with an often repeated quasi- Delphic statement made by Rauschenberg about how neither life nor art can be made and how his painting functions in the space between the two. Life is considered by him to be the hubbub outside the window except that it is not really outside of us in so far as we can successfully move in it only if we acknowledge its rules and regulations, which I didn’t when I ignored the no parking signs in NYC. His is a rather sophomoric statement on the level of the declarations of cosmic meaning of the stoned frat bros in “Animal House”. Perl does a good job of deconstructing the statement’s illogic. My first reaction is that, if for Rauschenberg painting exists between art and life, then does that mean that painting is not art. As for life, it follows very real laws. They may be hard to discern at times but they are formative. Perl points out Picasso’s drive for perfection. Is not this drive for perfection a struggle to discern rules that shape our world, of putting things back together again into a higher level of order. Rauschenberg is someone who knows how to take apart but does not know how to put things back together again in any meaningful way. He  has no interest in doing so and does not feel bad about it.

I was faulted by an artist, whose work I recently blogged about, for not discussing  her work on its own terms. I drew a distinction between her realism and the realism of Edwin Dickinson. Her work seemed unable to breach the distance between observer and the observed that was achieved in Dickinson’s work. It did not provide her any solace that I threw my work into the same categorical bin. I just wanted to define a category of painting that yearns for that connection between the self and the world but in the end fails to make the leap. That is a rather interesting position to be in rather than naively thinking you can bridge that gap. And as for making a leap of faith that may only be allowed to a few mystics.

I guess in that sense we have to be careful not to force Rauschenberg into a manner of thinking he consciously avoided. Except, that judging from Perl’s experience of the show as a whole, it seems to have left a bad taste in his mouth. He uses the adjective “unseemly”. From my knowledge of his work, the compilations of this work on a large scale in one building might elicit the response that someone should come to rework it and make radical sense out of it. I may have to venture to MoMA to experience this surfeit of undigested clutter.  I believe intuitive responses to the whole can be critical in understanding an artist’s work.While else have retrospectives.

I wrote in a blog awhile back about an interesting response that Heidegger made to a quote from Hegel. I tried to tie it to an understanding of de Kooning. The original statement by Hegel goes as follows:” A mended sock is better than a torn one.” Heidegger transforms it into his preferred form: “A torn sock is better that a mended one.”( a lot more violent construction than the Hegel comment) The discussion, which involves several philosophers, revolves around unity. When the sock is whole and being worn we are not aware of its unity. When it is torn we become aware or self-conscious of what holds it together in its being a sock. The tear points to a preceding wholeness. To mend the sock makes it whole again with a new self-awareness of an underlying unity. Is this not what de Kooning does: using cubism he takes the world apart and then aggressively with the template of the human body tries to mend it. Hegel says the scission points to a need for philosophy. This bringing back together is powerful in two ways: #1 the effort implied in the mending.#2 the force that resists this mending and wants to tear it apart again. de Kooning’s work participates in this dialectic as it moves back and forth between the whole and its parts to create a new whole.

de Kooning

Keeping with  sartorial metaphors, we could say that Rauschenberg is the master of mix and match. Because he ignores categories he can draw his playthings from all over the place. The effect of this strategy on subsequent generations of artist has been overwhelming. I wrote about this stylistic habit in the blog “Shake and Bake”. The artists in the show I reviewed have to be commended for not falling into the trap of Zombie Formalism, however there is a flaccid putting together of odds and ends that is clearly derivative of Rauschenberg. There is no anxiety in accepting the world as having fallen apart and needing mending. Perl says some critics see Rauschenberg as achieving the ”these fragments I have shored against my ruins” majesty of T.S. Eliot and is therefore the artist of the modern condition. Except that, as in the shake and bake crowd, there is none of the anxiety that Eliot felt about a world torn asunder.

Did Rauschenberg foreshadow the post-modern condition? According to Perl such a claim is made by Leah Dickerman in the catalog accompanying the show. I believe he did. For him the world is a sandbox where modernism provided him with all the uprooted and disembodied parts to play with. He was the artist perfectly suited for the new globalist space where everything is dislodged from its original context and shaped into momentary illusions of meaning which in the end are nothing more than an excessive piling of things on top of things. He is the happy prankster that mocks the emblems of the King’s claims to power. But being only a prankster and nothing more he has not the worries of a king nor interest in picking up the pieces.

If you like your postmodern condition you can keep your postmodern condition and Rauschenberg's your guy, but if not then you are left with a queasy feeling that art and society took a wrong turn in the middle of the last century and there is no turning back.

Innocence and Experience

Conversations at the Bow St gallery in Cambridge, once the most interesting alternative art space in the Boston area, were a fertile source for interesting blog posts. Owner/Artist, Addison Parks would bring groups of artists and art dealers together and the discussions that transpired were often lively. I would typically stand back and observe the banter. I could not keep up with the rapid repartee between Addison and book dealer/gallery owner John Wronoski. The late artist Larry Deyab once observed that all that back and forth was reminiscent of a Pinter play.

I recently participated in a curated show at an art center in VT managed by Katherine French, the former director of the Danforth Museum. I had no great hopes for the work being purchased or written about as it was too far from the art circles of Boston. However, toward the end of the show the art director informed me that a local collector had taken an interest in my painting. He wanted to hang it in his home for a trial run to see if it stood the test of time, so to speak. The painting belongs to a body of work that is recent and more complex in its use of color that has slowly evolved from bubble gum to richer and more saturated colors with marks transmogrifying into the cyrillic alphabet.  I was flattered that here was a collector in the Vermont woods who could possibly “get it”, even as it turned out, only for a week or two.

I had on occasion wanted to broadcast the potential sale to family and friends but I have become a laconic Yankee and knew not, to use the cliché barnyard saying that a Vermonter might appreciate, to count your chickens before they hatch. I was curious nonetheless to know what had happened and instead of stoically accepting the verdict asked the director what had led to the collector’s change of heart. She divulged that it was in fact the collector’s nine years old daughter who was smitten with the work and wanted her reluctant father to purchase it. I envisioned a young aesthete stamping her foot down stammering “I wanting my painting and I want it now”. What she loved about it were in fact characteristics that I thought were no longer part of my work: the candy color and bubbly strokes applied with a cake decorator. “No daughter you can’t have a painting with the rainbow colors of the Little Pony.”  I assume to have a painting with such cloying infantile traits was more than he could stomach even if it might please his daughter. Anyway, realist that he presumably is, he knew that one day she would out grow it and like all her childhood toys it would be relegated to attic clutter.

#76 2017 oil and wax on board  applied with pastry applicator 42"x 38" (later style with cyrillic letters)

Is there a moral to this story? Although certain critics have deciphered a hidden sinister aspect to my work that is being covered over by the colorful strokes applied with a pastry applicator (Rosanna Warren) or a sense of time in the paced application of my strokes (David Raymond) , my paintings have made several people angry to such a degree that they felt compelled to comment on my blog how repulsively saccharine they appear in color and mood. Or in the case of one artist/ critic, whom I was hoping would review my work in “Art New England", he had no idea what they were about. He just drew a blank. The use of my candy colors elicited excited responses in Provincetown years ago, where they were shown at DNA. Cate Mc Quaid in ”The Globe” responded twice to the  sensuality of the work. First in a show curated by Charles Giuliano. In her second review she found the sensuality was over the top. From my perspective the paintings challenge the typical viewer who is habituated to color used in optical color swatches in so much of the “Shake and Bake” abstraction that I see on line. My use of color eliciting synesthesia to merge appetitive and visual experience appealed to the hedonistic P’towners. But what if this child aesthete saw in the work something that partakes of the dichotomy between innocence and experience. Barbara O'Brien, currently director of the Kemper Museum, quoting Milton, titled the show of my work that she curated: "A Wilderness of Sweets". Addison Parks has pointed to my predilection for the feminine on several occasions in his reviews of the work on Artdeal and from the inception of this style at Crieger Dane in 2000 saw a paradisiacal return to the Garden.

#48 2013 44"x 46" oil and wax on board applied with pastry applicator (earlier bubblegum style)

Assuming that my premise is correct that that the nine year old girl saw in the work is analogous to the simple and innocent joys of a childhood toy like the “Little Pony”, I am reminded of analogous pleasures in Blake’s “The Lamb” : The mood of Spring, eternal recurrence of the prancing newborn lamb’s sheer delight in being alive. What is interesting is that this poem is spoken in the persona of a child:  ”I a child & thou a lamb”. It universalizes the spirit of the child’s and lamb’s innocence. What is this innocence? Why must innocence exist, when the lamb’s frolics in the green of Spring, end only in its  slaughter as a Spring lamb a few months later? Let us all be realists and scowl at the girl’s love of her little pony. The sooner she gets over it the better. As Beckett imagined, the newborn drops right from the womb into the grave.

                                                   The Lamb

                                        Little Lamb who made thee 

                                        Dost thou know who made thee 

                                        Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 

                                         By the stream & o'er the mead; 

                                        Gave thee clothing of delight, 

                                        Softest clothing wooly bright; 

                                        Gave thee such a tender voice, 

                                        Making all the vales rejoice! 

                                        Little Lamb who made thee 

                                        Dost thou know who made thee 

                                        Little Lamb I'll tell thee, 

                                        Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

                                        He is called by thy name, 

                                        For he calls himself a Lamb: 

                                        He is meek & he is mild, 

                                        He became a little child: 

                                        I a child & thou a lamb, 

                                        We are called by his name. 

                                        Little Lamb God bless thee. 

                                        Little Lamb God bless thee.

#66 26"x 24" 2016 oil and wax on board applied with pastry applicator (Picture the girl wanted)

For Blake, Christ was both a child and a lamb putting the innocence of the child and the lamb of the poem a priori in the realm of the godly. One cannot be a lamblike or a childlike without that innocence of God, which raises the question: what then is experience without innocence? Experience can only be a loss of innocence. Why do I in my painting linger in this realm of peachy keen colors if not to insist on the importance of this innocence that precedes experience. Or once out of the preternatural childhood realm of innocence can you ever get back to the garden? Can we move backward from experience to innocence so that innocence can be experienced at deeper and deeper levels as Nishitani says is possible with Nothingness?  Maybe the way back to the garden is to try to abandon the ego that one must have in relation to one’s interaction with the world. Is experience only the illusion of the shadows in Plato's cave. created by the light of pure innocence that we, so fixated on the here and now, cannot fathom?

Woven Tale picked this up and published it on their site with some editing