Leibniz Entelechy and Modernism (a reworking of my essay on Hollingsworth)

          Leibniz  Entelechy  Modernism

Martin Mugar

Coinciding with the debut of my writings in 2013 on the topic of Zombie Formalism I noticed that the New York artist Dennis Hollingsworth commenced to follow my writings with the occasional but always intelligent comment. The first time he commented on my painting is in the above statement made last year. The image to which he attached these words is also the first painting in years that I am most unequivocally happy about. For Hollingsworth it is functioning on at least three levels. (Text,Ground and Geometry).His words: 

"Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." 

The obvious observations made by Boston critics about the gooey candy-colored sensuality is not predominant for him but rather the functionality of the spatial play. He gets it probably because we are both swimming in the same waters, sharing especially the same attitude about the mark. Dennis is attracted to a gnarly irreducible shape that he achieves by cutting his own nibs for the pastry applicator at the expense of the whole. I fall back on store bought nibs letters using the Cyrillic alphabet squeezed out also with a pastry applicator. Our marks are volumetric. For me the volumetric was a commentary on a road not taken in painting where the sloppy confidence of the abex stroke had taken over the thought process of so much painting. My exuded marks evolved from simple drips, to the Cyrillic alphabet, to whole words. Dennis refers to this as the text of the painting. The irreducible for Dennis lies in the strangeness of the stroke; for me the letter and the word. 

Martin Mugar

In June I visited his gallery in Paris Galerie Richard and asked to see some of his work. The director demurred saying they were still in crates having been recently moved due to the closing of the Galerie Richard in NYC and the packing was hard to unpack. Upon my return to the USA I sent Dennis an email telling him of my visit but did not hear back. Recently, I visited his website only to remark that he was being referred to in the past tense. Someone engaged a ChatGPT  write his story as an artist. It had a bittersweet lilt to it. It was dated April 2023. 

Dennis Hollingsworth 

 

                                                          

In fact, lately, he has been using his webpage and is still alive and painting. I feel fortunate to have heard his opinions on the art world which were for the most part conservative in intent. He was commenting on Twitter on the ongoing struggle in Ukraine understanding the manipulation of the American Neo-Cons in perpetuating it. He had just started to take and interest in the notion of Monadology as it might apply to his work. Again, the irreducible is something that intrigues him.

The notion of entelechy or purpose or realization of potential used in Leibniz's thinking  apply to Hollingsworth's work. Each strangely wrought entity does not have its future subject to being revealed by being taken apart or a priori ahead of itself. It could also have an affinity to Heidegger's anti-technicity or "Letting be".  His work is anti-cartesian . Cartesianism subjects the object to being infinitely torn apart into smaller and smaller bites but not about its future. Ellsworth Kelly ends up to be just flatness or just the material of its making or Basquiat's will  is to flatten and empty out what it paints. Hollingsworth has something to do I believe with the late Frank Stella's late work which is full of Baroque pneuma. More importantly it raises questions about  the many underlying assumptions of modern art and science that are replete with cynicism  about what is ahead and gloating about infinite dissolution or emptying out of meaning as say in the work of Koons or Currin.

Dennis Hollingsworth

Martin Mugar 

"Everything in life is drawing" Richard Tuttle

 I showed with Tuttle once thanks to Addison Parks who had a Tuttle in his private collection. It may have been a gift from Tuttle who at one point was a friend of Parks. He may have purchased it. Parks put us together in a rather interesting show at the Creiger-Dane gallery in Boston in 1998 of a handful of New York and Boston artists called “Severed Ear” in what was a postmodernist take on the evolution of modernism. Of course, Severed Ear refers to Van Gogh’s angst and pain. A reference to the human origins of the Modern that over time tread a road toward the Minimal. In a remembrance of Parks in “Provincetown Arts” I mentioned the show’s similarity to the abstract artists considered “Provisional” by Raphael Rubinstein. I had hoped that the show would have an influence on the sensibility of the Boston Scene but that was not to happen as Boston continues to ignore consequential movements, that come from outside its sphere of influence as it did with its preference for Boston Impressionism over the French Modernism of the Armory show. To this day this absence of European modernism presents a huge gap in the MFA’s collection that currently is too expensive to fill.

 

The Tuttle that Addison owned, if my memory serves me, was a not very large oblong rectangle drawing on a rectangular piece of plywood that is to be exhibited nonchalantly on the floor leaning up against the wall. According to Addison, gallery goers felt compelled to report to the gallery director that it had fallen off the wall. I think Tuttle wanted to kick the experience of drawing off the wall out of the realm of framed paper and into the space of the pedestrian (both meanings)  where it gets accidentally kicked. I saw a Tuttle show in NYC with Addison that I did not “get”. Mixed media with no attempt to make parts react to a whole. The Hegelian dialectic has until recently directed my own work and its absence in Tuttle irked me to protest the validity of much of what Tuttle does. Addison had to tell me to shut up.

Recently, Jason Travers an artist in the Providence area and a former student from AIB sent me an image of the kind of “drawing” he sees in the asphalt fillings that are ubiquitous on New England roads: an effort to fill in the cracks formed on roads due to frost heaves. The cracks left unattended only speed up the deterioration of the road. There obviously is a machine that pushes out the asphalt at a consistent rate that must be responded to by a regulated gesture of the worker so that the liquid asphalt does not overflow the cracks. These are pedestrian drawing as they are created by someone walking in pedestrian space and make no claim to art. Like Tuttle whose work yearns to jump off the wall, this drawing is part of our lived space and moreover engages the slow entropy (Brice Marden)of time and space of frost heaves and engaging our battle against the deterioration of the road.

                                                                   

                                                    

One drawing that has nothing to do with our agency are the patterns on the feathers of the Barred Owl. This is a drawing achieved over millennia  The intelligence of nature helped this bird blend in with the tree bark. It is not hiding itself from predators as I assume it has none but is hiding from its prey. The photo has had some success on FB as the owls presence is not revealed instantaneously . As Tuttle says in the above quote: Everything is drawing

                                                                 

                                                                   Iguana art                                                          

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