Jed Perl's review of the Koons Retrospective in "The New York Review of Books"

Jed Perl continues his quixotic tilting at wind mills in his latest review of the Koons phenomenon.That something must be said to deflate this conflation of art and global finance goes without saying.There is a slightly queasy sensation when we behold  the commercial event surrounding the work but also the work itself, an emotion that the early critics felt spoke to Koons being an artist that they had yet to come to terms with.The notion of the avant-garde that keeps pulling the rug out from under the complacent Bourgeoisie is the paradigm they use to justify his historical significance.Weren't the French academicians appalled by Cezanne and Van Gogh; the New York press by the Armory show?

Anxious to be on the right side of history the apologists go to no end to convince us that Koons is the latest turn in the on-going dialectic toward perfect self-consciousness, bringing us closer to our inner essence, which they stupidly imagine to be a love of kitsch. If you look at the work dialectically it does not in any way serve as a heightening of self-consciousness that counters any synthesis as did the work of Cezanne, for example, but rather represents a collapse of any tension between the individual and society. In my review of a show at the MFA in Boston, that placed the work of the Impressionists side by side with the work of the Academy, I demonstrated that  artists like Monet were more in touch with the scientific tradition of optics that had informed the work of someone like Chardin, than the academicians who painted in a fatigued version of chiaroscuro and were unable to take the next step toward color perception in painting. If you assume that the essence of the Impressionists and for that matter Matisse was to paint crudely and assume that any time you witness that crudeness in art it is a sure sign that the artist is the next Matisse, you are putting the cart before the horse and in fact create a perverse paradigm that only bad taste can assure that an artist's work is of enduring value. Monet was studying color theory, bringing painting back to the perceptual roots of the Renaissance and the Baroque and Van Gogh was searching in the tradition of the Christian saints for a way to overcome not just the spiritual smugness of his time but to make his life more meaningful. They were both reactionaries,i.e. backward looking, in their attempts to move painting forward. They were more self-conscious than their contemporaries and more aware of the the traditions that shaped European painting.

Look at Cabanel and Bouguereau if you want to see  precedents of Koons. They too leave you with a queasy feeling in your stomach. Unctuous, syrupy, cloying. In some sort of intellectual legerdemain, the contemporary critics imagine Koons to be cutting edge but as Perl says there is no way he can be put in the same category as the ascetic Duchamp, whose leap out of the visual still remains hard to process today. He is rather the protege of Warhol who saw the individual as merged into the commercial.That abandonment of the self into the commercial is the goal of all the rich businesspeople who buy Koons' work. They make their billions by seeing the masses as Play-Doh, just material to exploit. If we are as emotionally devoid of seriousness as Koons proclaims, we are ripe to enter a strange sort of paradise of the end times where we surround ourselves with kitschy possessions and kitschy emotions and dissolve our lives into some sort of colorful puddle. Are we at the end of history where Hegel's Absolute is the media and the tension between the heft of the individual and the media is erased.

.Just as the academicians were a symptom of the decadent Bourgeoisie of the 19thc, whose pseudo- classical vision of mankind had no relation to the facticity of the lives of real people so Koons is the wet dream of the class of global kleptocrats who envision the masses  acquiescing absolutely to their drive to sell us more and more things. I agree with Perl that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and quote Shakespeare's  quintessential paragon of self-consciousness:Hamlet:

"Oh God I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space-were it not that I  have bad dreams."

(In my article on the topos of modern culture I place Koons in the context of Western Nihilism)

I can be followed on twitter @mugar49

"Modern Painters" considered this article for publication in an issue on Cezanne.The editor, Karen Wright, said it was "thought provoking".

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Impressions of France: Money, Renoir, Pisarro and Their Rivals

Fall 1995,The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Impressions of France”, a somewhat unwieldy exhibition of French landscape painting from the mid to late 19th century documents parallels and differences between mainstream landscapes painted principally for purchase by the French State and those of the Impressionists which although contemporaneous were not initially considered worthy of acquisition by the French Government. The work of Cezanne, Pisarro, Monet and Sisley on view represent a way of seeing that is now considered to be the foundation of modernism; on the other hand in the Salon landscapes we witness the winding down of a universally accepted style that had had its origin in the Baroque and which in the hands of the French Salon painters becomes decidedly decadent . This simultaneous winding down of one style and the burgeoning growth of another raises questions of how historically styles succeed one another. The notion of what is decadent and what authentic looms large in this show and most importantly the role that individual vision and imagination play in establishing a new style.

According to Michael Baxandall’s book ”Shadows and Enlightenment” scientists and artists of the 18th century were interested in the nature of perception and in particular the way the retina translates patterns of light and dark into form. According to Baxandall the authenticity of an artist such as Chardin lies in great measure in his ability to convey the notion that the observed is the invention of the seer. #1. The paintings center of gravity is always within the observer. The acceptance of a unique light source and the fluency and immediacy of the brush strokes contribute as well to the sensation that we are inside the artist’s consciousness. Although the narrative and the social implications are important, the studied expression of the perceptual experience as visual event is primary. In the case of the salon painters the center of gravity seems to lie outside the viewer in the landscape and with the story the landscape would convey to the socially dominant class that might purchase the painting. All socially relevant detail is explicitly represented: The geographical location, recognizable monuments such as Chartres Cathedral, the social class of the people in the landscape (usually peasants). The brush strokes vary within each painting depending on what they are conveying .The formulas and motifs are repeated enough to be identified as such: over and over we are served up the road narrowing in perspective and several individuals strolling along this road which reaches its vanishing point midpoint in the horizon.

The overwhelming mood of the Salon paintings is one of melancholy . The oversized canvasses with their large expanses of sky, sea or field induce a feeling of disorientation . The preferred time of day is dusk. The self that is manifest is not the strong self that eventually dominates 20th century art from Picasso to deKooning and Serra. In the salon painting man is clearly not the measure by which the expanse of space is parceled out. These artists believe naively in the illusion that chiaroscuro creates.  Once that illusion is established, the references to social narrative abandon both the facticity of the objects represented and the object making ability of the eye. The artists space is neither universal nor personal but one of shared social assumptions and prejudices, especially those assumptions based on institutions such as the Church and the bourgeoisie which represent the conservatism of the dominant social order. To convey the dominant role of the former, Churches figure prominently in many of the paintings and to reassure the bourgeoisie of its control over the working class comforting images of peasants quietly accepting their burden of labor in the fields fill numerous landscapes.

How were the Impressionists capable of becoming the “forerunners of modernism” affecting ultimately a sea change in art, which relegates their competitors of the academy to the dustbin of history. Merleau-Ponty in an insightful essay on Cezanne, entitled “Cezanne’s Doubt” provides a possible explanation in his description of the psyche of the most important artist of the pre-modernist revolution. #2 In Merleau-Ponty’s view Cezanne is clinically schizophrenic. Felicitous human interaction is beyond him. Most of his personal relationships are fraught with suspicion. Over the course of this life he appears according to the observations of townsfolk to become more and more embittered and alienated. Although lacking in the social skills of the world and according to his childhood friend Emile Zola insensitive to the social and political issues of the late 19th century France, he was exquisitely attuned to the shape that the impressions of the observed world took within him. These are impressions not shared with his fellow citizens. There are no labels on his paintings either figuratively or literally like the name on the stern of a boat on Elodie La VIllette’s painting that situates the landscape for the viewer in Dieppe. A church or anything recognizable except primordial rocks, trees and sky, does not dominate Cezanne’s landscape. The impressions are configured into an architecture where each stroke is part of a whole. There is no sloppy variation of style from part to part as we see in the Salon painters.

The thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s essay is that Cezanne’s illness defined his attitude toward painting. Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to distinguish this emotional background from Cezanne’s project, which starting from the hand that nature dealt him builds out of it a noble oeuvre. What I find helpful in this analysis is the notion that that Cezanne’s illness made him incapable at both the personal and the societal level of reading the social signs that bind us to society; so that at heart he remained unsocialized and therefore eminently qualified to focus on the inner experience of apprehending the landscape as landscape rather than the role is plays in French Culture. Everything is turned inside out. The roads that meander off into the horizon from the bottom of the painting in a large number of the Salon landscapes are present in Cezanne’s paintings but he subverts the expected reality so that the road ends up closer to the viewer at its vanishing point than where it began. What serves as an entry point into the painting for the salon artists actually functions as an obstacle to entering into Cezanne’s painting.

Seeing the work of Cezanne side by side with his once well-established contemporaries accentuates the common notion of Cezanne as “farouche” and renders the Salon artist more insipid than they would appear beyond the context of this show. Cezanne’s choice of what to paint reflects the thought processes of someone who “just doesn’t get it”. In one small landscape (most of the impressionist works are noticeably smaller than those of their salon counterparts) he paints a landscape with branches obscuring the road. One can almost imagine that he was dropped blindfolded before the scene and asked to paint unflinchingly the scene before him when the blindfold was removed. He would be forced to abandon all conventions and go beyond the narrative constructs that lock us into daily life. Whereas La Villette, Bavoux and the countless unknown artist of the late 19th century continue to paint in the now fatigued manner of the of the once radical concepts of chiaroscuro and perspective, Cezanne drops down from the retina which is the locus of value perception to the striate cortex of the brain where the values are analyzed according to verticality, horizontality and diagonality. #3 Just as Caravaggio’s rigorous and powerful use of chiaroscuro spread rapidly throughout Europe to define the styles of Velasquez, Rembrandt and Vermeer, Cezanne’s understanding of the role of line direction and its relations to seeing space becomes the raw material for cubism, minimalism and various optically based art forms of the 20th century.

The implication of my interpretation of Cezanne’s personality on a general notion of the evolution of the language of painting is that stylistic change can be achieved not only by deconstructing the current visual language but by going beyond it to the underpinnings of that language which are not yet culturally appropriated. Those thinkers and artists who promote modern paradigms of cultural revolution that aim to deconstruct accepted ways of seeing at a cultural level in order to go beyond them would do well to study Cezanne. Oblivious to the social signs and symbols, the accretion of his inherited culture he could more fully discover the inner visual structure of the eye/mind. The battle of transformation is not won only by questioning the notions of the current visual order but by digging deeper into the structure of the eye/mind itself. That the possibilities of the language of chiaroscuro had run their course could only be understood by a few people who were not easily seduced by its current incarnation as a vehicle for describing the social order of the late 19th century. The creation of these artists was anew language, more vigorous and inclusive of varieties of the visual experience, which grew out of how the landscape was internally apprehended, not what is was supposed to represent externally to the class of collectors and cognoscenti of the time.

#1 Baxandall, Michael.” Shadows and Enlightenment”, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

#2Merleau-Ponty,Maurice “Cezanne’s Doubt” in “Sense and Non-Sense”, Translated by Hubert L. Derives and Patricia Allen Derives, 6th edition (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 1991) pages 9-25

#3Hoffman,Howard S, “Vision and the Art of Drawing”, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989) pages 48-67.

In rereading this essay I was struck by the author's reference to "willed vulgarity".I think what she is refering to was my conscious decision to accept our basic human condition of irrationality and raw will.It is something picked up stylistically from the late Guston.We must start from "the cruel chaotic base" before we can pretend to have any"raffinement".

  Camp on Canvas: Martin Mugar        

 

“My painting is about the desire that underlies the facts,” writes Martin Mugar in the handsomely illustrated announcement for his recent show of Oil and Wax series paintings at Suffolk University. The verb “underlies” provides one key to this enigmatic and sensuous new work: the fatty tissue of Mugar’s strokes springs out from the canvas, introducing a third dimension to this art of the flat surface, and teasingly suggesting the presence of a truth under the visible evidence. “Facts,” provides another key. Considering Mugar’s evolution from the still life paintings of the 1980’s through the Hofmannesque Abstract Expressionism in the 1990’s and into his new color field phase, we are led to ponder the different sorts of “facts” that painting proposes. And, “desire.” That word is not carelessly printed on Mugar’s announcement with its luscious, sherbet colors. Nor, for that matter, is the word “painting.” These days it takes either a very naïve or a boldly sophisticated artist to put brush to canvas. Mugar is of the latter breed.

            He loves the brush, and the delicate materiality of paint, and the symbolic properties of light and shape. An early still life from 1984 shows his allegiances: behind the blockily painted, laterally displayed cups, jugs and conch shell, and in the subdued tones of ivory, cream, granite grays, and umber, stand Chardin and his later interpreters, Cézanne and Derain. Mugar’s brushwork here is forceful, and most of all one notices the subtle distinctions in hue and value on the busily articulated tablecloth, the sides and shoulders of the objects.

            Two years later, in “Still Life 1986” shown at the M. I. T. Museum, Mugar has declared a certain independence. This is no longer homage or canny apprentice work. Table top, room, and objects have been severely reduced, and the palette has lightened to a kinky range of pinks, lavenders, mustards and crocus green. In their simplified shapes, the three discernible cups or jugs are no longer presented with any gesture toward three-dimensional illusion; they hover as sculpted cloud shapes in the dense atmosphere of the painting in which solid matter and air share the same molecular formula.

            In the 1990’s, Mugar moved into a phase he calls his Abstract Expressionism. At his own pace, thoughtfully, privately, he worked his way through the idioms and evolution of Modernist painting, years in arrears of the path-breakers DeKooning, Pollock, Hofmann, Guston et al., but proving the integrity of his own shape-making and of his translation of the tradition into his own terms. Mugar’s paintings from the 90’s are exuberant affairs. Often five or six feet wide and high, painted in bold, risky, but controlled strokes, these works often suggest landscape while disturbing spatial logic and playing depths against abrupt blockages of foreground. “Self in Landscape” of 1990 depicts no “self,” but some swashbuckling black calligraphy outlines a slender central rectangle within a larger frame and arranges a perspective reminiscent of an outside scene—mounds of juicy foliage and hillish backdrop, with a deep cobalt swatch of sky above—perceived through a window. The window itself seems to be promenading through outdoor-space, not attached to any indoor architecture. Thetwo awkward calligraphic rectangles might be taken as focusing devices, and thereby as a mark of an organizing human vision—the “self” in the landscape. “Still Life” (1989) proclaims itself, in its wadded block-like shapes, a kind of assemblage of objects crowded on a table top, perhaps beneath a window sill above which succulent green stalks and a golden background are visible.  The painting permits no conventional reading of objects in gravitational space, however; planes of color—the cerulean cloud in the foreground, the salmon pink box astride it—announce their own proud color and texture rather than “objectness.”

            By the late 90’s, Mugar has cut loose still further from referential conventions. “Mulch” (1996) shares a gestural language with “Mackerel Crowded Seas” (1997), so the titles no longer serve a descriptive function so much as an obliquely symbolic one. In both of these large paintings, a massive central cluster of drippingly brushed ovals dominates the surface. In “Mulch,” this Easter egg fantasia emerges from a background of slurpy, billowing cream, salmon and mustard, while the eggs themselves are outrageously striped in peacock blue, lemon, rose and burnt sienna. “Mackerel Crowded Seas” (the phrase from Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium”) suggests nothing fishy in its crayola-flesh cluster of ovals and trailing tentacles, except perhaps a dream of explosively fertile fish eggs. In both of these paintings and their weird coloration, a strong element of camp and of willed vulgarity generates a peculiar energy.

            Around 2000, Mugar’s work took a significant turn. As he has described it, “The third period is a stepping out of the push-pull of self and group and is a painstaking sensitizing of every mark, every stroke out of which is created a purer self.” Purer self or no (a matter impossible for an outsider to judge), these new paintings, including the Oil and Wax series shown last fall at Suffolk, have radically changed their focus and their organization of incident. They present a unified surface of repeated gestures, symmetrical drips, in a limited chromatic range. They flaunt bubble gum and sherbet colors: strawberry, pale lime, baby blue, café au lait, tangerine cream, lemon ice… To distinguish one painting from another and to read each individual painting, one finds oneself peering hard at the facture of the strokes. Some of the paintings have a tighter weave than others; some allow more ragged drip at the base of the canvas; some allow one color (say, pink) to predominate in the quasi-pointilliste scheme, while others yield (say) to lime.

            Let us take, for example, a pinkish 36 by 40 inch painting from 2003. Because the wax thickens the oil pigment to an almost sculptural medium, Mugar is able to energize the surface not only by chromatic variation across the surface, but in the goopy three-dimensional events that add the further graphic element of shadow. In the 2003 canvas, a considerable downward tension is provoked by the gobs at the top of the canvas that initiate the downwardly overlapping leaf shapes. In the main pattern, the elevated strokes, tightened by wax, cast shadows beneath their scales and stalactite drips, so that suddenly this light-hearted weave is complicated, in mood, by shade, the dark underlining of each stroke, the suggestion of secrete depths and cavities. The bottom edge has an even more sinister development: the final smears protrude beyond the border, leaving a ragged bottom with bits of bare canvas exposed. Some kind of illusion is broken here, about the tidy, sugary harmony proposed by the whole painting. That order is revealed as produced by a process, possibly a violent one, capable of dissolution.

            Scanning the works in the Oil and Wax series for their small but significant differences becomes a lesson in seeing.  They all enjoy a democracy of stroke and color. But then a tiny irregularity will announce itself—such as the small salmon scale with no overhang just below the center of the small square from 2005—and become an event that affects the entire composition.

            At times these strokes suggest leaves, at times scales, at times electrons. They seem to argue that reality is composed of an underlying geometric regularity. And it appears a celebratory regularity, funky and outrageous in hue. Celebratory, that is, and even pretty, until the unnaturalness of the colors become alarming; and until we note the shadow schemes and border clots that tell a more disorderly story. With this new series, Mugar has invented a mode that is entirely his own. It has visual and tactile authority, a high degree of craft (something one no longer necessarily expects from art presented in public), and a powerful metaphysical suggestiveness. It is intelligent, sensuous painting that has kept faith with its traditions and has at the same time registered an original mode of seeing for our age of quarks and fractals.

 

Rosanna Warren