Can you jump out of "Enframement"? Or is everything just mostly post modern?

                                         

2021 #98 oil and wax on canvas on board.It functions on so many levels as pointed out by Dennis Hollingsworth: "Text Peeking, Ground Margins Geometry Tweaking."

My attempt to rethink the notion of provisional painting seems to have had some success judging from the number of favorable responses from people, who had written about this quasi-movement. I say qausi in the sense you are not going to see photos of the Provisionalists, as you did of the Abstract Expressionists photographed in bars together discussing their theories. It is more an educated guess of what appears to be a cultural Zeitgeist. Sort of in the realm of Facebook “likes”. Moreover, I suspect that many of these artists identified as provisional don’t either know each other or reject the label. Has there ever been a schism within the movement?

2022 oil and wax on canvas #101

What worked for me in order to get a handle on this movement was to take a deductive approach in analyzing it.  Rubinstein, (N.B.)hanging out in the Brooklyn art scene, began to see similar gestures and strategies that led him to assume a certain cultural mood was informing all these artists. My approach accepted that there is always a Zeitgeist, which is shaped at any given time by overarching forces, that influences how we act. Whereas he pieced it together empirically, I worked with a notion that is historial, i.e. history gets its impetus from certain seminal ideas that can shape generations. They can work their way into society from the top down and slowly transform it, so that at any given time within an era we can see a stage of that idea’s evolution say from Dada to Punk. The idea will hit a dead-end, lose its shaping power, at which point something totally contradictory will take hold of society to disrupt the status quo. Working with Vattimo’s ideas of nihilism, I detected a certain winding down of metaphysics in the provisional painters. This social phenomenon that he observed in the artists he met was accurate but he failed to see it as just a particular moment in an ever-evolving push/pull with the nihilist impetus, initiated by Nietzsche, more than a hundred years ago. Nietzsche predicted that Nihilism’s rejection of higher values, to which we aspire as in Plato’s notion of the Good or in Superman’s slogan: ”Truth, Justice, and the American way”, would lead to a slow devolution of the individual into a kind of atomized irrelevancy.  

2018

Critics began to see provisionality everywhere. It crops up in Matisse. Every erasure somehow foreshadowed the artists of the early 21^st century, whereas in reality Matisse and the provisionalists could not be more different in intent. The aesthetic attitude toward phenomena of Matisse is grounded in a will to control them, based in a positivistic view of the self. Self-consciousness imparts a priori to visual events a certain shape or structure. That structure is not conceived totally intact but is intuited over time. The self-conscious artist is like a scientist empirically collecting data but with the intent of shaping it into a coherent whole. Matisse may have had doubts at any given moment in the execution of a painting but there is a will to the whole that puts him at antipodes to the artists of Provisionalism. Their's is a “what me worry” approach to art untouched by the “anxiety of influence” that most likely represents a dead-end of metaphysic’s influence on art, for which Vattimo provides the perfect notion of “weak thought”.

I have been accused on my blog by some artists of being a curmudgeon, unwilling to see the good in what is being done in contemporary art, or by others of not presenting a more positive path for artists to follow.  Actually my latest blogs are really not attempts to blame or praise but to dispassionately place (with the occasional snarky comment) what I have seen in the galleries into a larger intellectual and historical context. Without explicitly saying it, I have negatively implied what I think would be a more profitable and rich route to follow in art. I had to accept that the Zeitgeist is one of Nihilism, so that a provisional painter, who is perceived to be deconstructing the polish and technological purity of  Koons, is just expressing another aspect of nihilism already embedded in Koons. So, if Nihilism were so pervasive, in order to jump out of its grasp would be to, in a historial sense, establish a new beginning. (I use historial as opposed to historical to distinguish between a sense of history being the play of ideas that we swim in vs. just a list of facts and events that occurred over time). How to do that?

Sometimes, I muse about the centrality of the role of the written word in society and whether its centrality is not being replaced by computer code. Both languages achieve the same purpose, which is to establish a notion of temporal stability or what Heidegger calls “the while”. The reality of the Internet and the computer is one of a constant presence and presencing and words for example, what I am writing now, are establishing the presence of my view on art. Both are also propositions about what is real. But the Internet is more incontrovertible. The network of electricity that runs the computer, the fuel that runs the power plants that make the electricity and the interaction of hardware and software is based on a science that is not a proposition that you can easily deconstruct (pace Derrida). Moreover, as physical fact, it integrates and coordinates the activity of countless people, businesses, countries and political institutions. Heidegger calls this scientific reality “enframement”. Like nihilism it is all around us. It is the real that is rational and in turn its rationality is our reality. But just defining enframement, can’t change the reality of this scientific domain, which insures that we live in a mass culture where everything is wired together. Every attempt to break the bonds of the scientific stranglehold gets co-opted by the system. We all have our individual cell phones but the NSA monitors them all. We have our laptops that we can carry around with us and personalize but by virtue of being part of the World Wide Web our activities on that web are monitored.

To get back to my point, writing and for that matter painting, unlike our cyber-reality, are the evocations of personal time and are grounded in our body and mind. Painting still privileges the individual and their own notion of time. It is, as well, in an inevitable dialogue with all that painting has ever been, so that intentionally or otherwise the artist is forced to accept the history of painting. Its uniqueness lies in its ability to create time out of its own language, which forces the viewer to linger in front of it.  It has physical presence that can only be experienced in a gallery, face to face with the viewer. It can just have a vertical presence that it imposed on the viewer as in a Barnet Newman abstraction. It can stop time as in Richter’s work, or disrupt our routine by turning the world upside down as in Baselitz. Make it repetitive as in Stella’s early work. Explode time into post-apocalyptic dissolution as in Pollock or dogmatically have color push and pull the eye into the canvasses space from the surface and back to it again as in Hoffmann’s work. Kelley by deconstructing the structural elements of the canvas that support the color in a sense dismantles time, (the ultimate manifestation of my Humpty Dumpty effect).

The late philosopher Reiner Schurmann in discussing Heidegger’s notion of time makes the point that time is a societal construct purely created by man. His “Broken Hegemonies” is a powerful exposition of the way cultural notions of “what man is” can hold sway for centuries privileging one view of action over others. These paradigms are topological, in that they shape time and space, so that modern art will look very different from a Medieval art. The stain glass at Chartres vs. “Broadway Boogie Woogie”. These notions tend to favor group identities and organization over the individual. For Schurmann this gives rise to the tragic condition, when an individual’s actions are out of step with the prevailing and/or new cultural paradigms. It is in particular tragic when there are cultural shifts that leave people, who espouse the values of an earlier reality, stranded in a brave new world. A story from ancient Greece that captivates Schurmann most, so that it becomes a leitmotiv of “Broken Hegemonies” is that of Antigone, who ignores the laws of the state to bury her brother Polynices.  Polynices, who has been killed in his attempt to wrest back the throne from his brother Eteocles, is considered an enemy of the state and not worthy of proper burial. Antigone inspired by what she sees are more eternal values such as the bonds of family and the ancient will of the Gods ignores the laws of the state. For this she is executed. This notion of conflict between deeply held personal beliefs and those of the status quo becomes paradigmatic of the tragic condition of humanity.

In an earlier book by Schurmann “Heidegger on Being and Acting”, he refers to cultural paradigms as grounded in “arche”, original seminal events from which they draw their energy. The question he raises and which he feels is central to Heidegger’s thought is the following: Can we act anarchically?  By this he means without why and without goal, not chaotically. Every epoch is defined by an event that controls how individuals act and how they perceive the whole. Notions of the present and presencing become paramount in the language of Heidegger as well as epochal definitions of how that present is defined. Take for example what he considers to be the last great epoch of mankind that we are still experiencing: the Modern era of self-consciousness initiated by the language around Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum”. It posits reality on our ability to know it rationally. Schurmann defines the Medieval era as one where the individual seeks to be defined by the light of God, which comes from above. In the Modern era man is his own light and shines it on reality. (I suddenly think of our life in cars with their headlights on aimed ahead of us as we willy-nilly try to define our time and space). This notion of the self implies a transcendental attitude toward the self as subject to which everything becomes either object or objectified. It gets inflated to the notion of the Nation or the People as in Communism. Heidegger, who had already in his early work tried to ground mankind in the world into which he is thrown, becomes more conscious of the definitions of the overarching society, which are extensions of the individual definitions to the world when he himself gets caught up in National Socialism. All his subsequent writing is aimed at extricating the fallacies of his thought that lead to that association.

A word that comes up in discussions of Heidegger’s very Nietzschean and aphoristic “Contributions to Philosophy” is poiesis. It is meant to indicate the growth of something in time out of a unique origin. It is held up in distinction to the propositional nature of modern western thought. Propositional thinking pins things down, stops them like a snapshot and or entangles them in mathematical formula. Poiesis lets things be and understands them in their reality in the world as a nexus of events. Heidegger is totally cognizant of the reality of  modernity and comes up with several notions that allow us to get a handle on it: one is Machination, the other giganticism. Machination came out of his reading of Ernst Junger’s ”The Worker” which studied the total mobilization of a nation during the National Socialist era but it could be as easily applied to Fordism in the United States. Giganticism tries to grasp the economics of enormous scale that define the US and Russia of the Soviet era. For Heidegger this is the outcome of the metaphysics of self-consciousness as it evolves into economics of quantity over quality. How does one live on this “monstrous site” ?(Schurmann’s words)

Schurmann describes three modern strategies to avoid the tragic view of life that was mentioned above. “If there is a task and a possibility for thinking today, it can only be that of letting normative consciousness collapse-not by putting a stop to philosophy so as to pass on, whether to the science #1(the Anglo-Saxon temptation), or to literature #2(the French temptation) but by learning not to have wholehearted faith in semantic maximization.” The third is the phenomenology of Husserl, who covers over the abyss with  clear unambiguous ideas and shapes that have a certain incontrovertible nature to them. Husserl had been instrumental in establishing the notion of intentionality, that all ideas are about something and therefore place us in a lived world. Intentionality had a big impact on his student Heidegger. However, Husserl remained unwilling to put the self completely in the world as Heidegger did, holding on to the self-conscious apprehension of the world in clear and distinct ideas. These were referred to as  “eidetic” reductions, or observable and concrete shapes and form of what is. This, I believe had a big influence on those artists whose language is purely intended for societal maximization of the technological: Malevich, Mondrian, Stella, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Wade Guyton, minimalist architecture. Only Rothko knows he is papering over the void. 

When I taught Western Civilization at UNC-Greensboro, my first lecture started with slides of sculptures of men on horseback dating from the Assyrians to modern times. These for me embodied the reality that all civilizations are built on the backs of a suppressed people and that the first examples of art showing sympathy for the oppressed were Delacroix’s massacre at Chios and Goya’s black paintings. Schurmann says as much when he makes the point that all public realms are built out of a tragic event where family bonds are sacrificed as in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia or Creon’s execution of Antigone.

First time I imposed a major reworking of a figurative painting (1986)(private collection Florida)

I don’t think that art likes to dwell in this spot and if it does it is most often not for long. Schurmann borrows the pair of concepts, natality and mortality from Hannah Arendt, with whom he taught at the New School in New York, to show how each new generation (natality) favors maximization of ideas that give new shape to society: whether it be socialism or communism or technology. He uses also the word "thetic", which I take to be equivalent to ideological to describe how ideas become totalizing during the reign of any given Hegemony. Each generation takes the world for their own bowl of cherries. But as they age their singularity (Mortality) becomes more important or the "thetic" realm can be so harsh as it was for Shostakovich in the Soviet Union that his work is from the beginning all about the struggle of the individual against the ideological realm. Most of his colleagues were happy to sing the praises of the Soviet People and the nomenclature, although they acknowledged the superiority of Shostakovich’s genius, had little tolerance for the schizoid back and forth between harmony and dissonance. The evolution of say Michelangelo from the metaphysical glories of the Last Judgment to the poignant unfinished pietas captures that transition perfectly. Hired by the Church at the height of its power to describe the interpenetration of heaven and earth to singularizing his own struggle to transcend his mortality is the epitome of pathos.

I doubt that this notion of the tragic will ever become central to any modern aesthetic. It is not how the world works. The Modern world  needs common currency to perform its day-to-day tasks. It has to be inert and function as multiples. I thought of how perfect Wade Guyton's inkjet images function as inert units of printed exchange. At all costs the objects that the Wall Street hedge funds buy have to be drained of human feeling. And if there is any horror these days at the positivist and commercial bias of our artistic language it is only snarky and dandified.

How does one paint in the context of society enframed by the technological and the commercial? If Schurmann imagines that “normative consciousness” should collapse, what does he mean by that? He refers elsewhere to a distinction between societal time and primordial time.  Is this the leap we have to take to experience something alive and new? Heidegger applies all sorts of thought experiences to contextualize the societal notion of time. Sometimes he sets it off against the darkness of the earth and talks of how the artist uses the earth in his or her painting, a literal grounding of the abyss. At other times he imagines society (the world) interfaced with the abyss. Another thought experiment is his notion of letting things be. Not entrapping the world in a framework of science. Letting the things “thing” or the world “world”.

Transition from figuration to abstraction with color reduction(Massachusetts collection ,1989)

"Yellow Submarines"(private collection Germany,1994)

I have always painted out of a reverence for the many visual languages that are available to any artist who wants to ground their work in visuality (my website)  I would like to think I have followed Heidegger’s notion of thinking as thanking. I observed in the evolution of Western Art over the 20^th century, a move toward understanding optically how we perceive the real. I saw each stage as an expansion of the power of the vocabulary afforded the artist so that, oblivious to the current art scene, I would try to absorb for example the colors of the Fauves, when the art world was enthralled by Minimalism, in so far as I saw it as step toward understanding more deeply what made Minimalism possible. To reduce my language to simple and pure colors as building blocks was for me a singular achievement. At any given point in this evolution I would hit on something that pushed back or glimmered out of the dust of my search, similar to a prospector hitting pay dirt. By the mid-Nineties I had pretty much worked my way up to the push and pull language of Hoffmann using pure flat color shapes. The flip-flop of figure ground ambiguity intrigued me. It slowed time down in the painting as it held the attention of the patient viewer, who could wait for the image to rearrange itself. Around the mid to late Nineties, something took hold of my work. Whereas up until that point I was reducing the images to simple flatness, which was an act of will that embodied conflict, a sense of multiplicity of being part of a world, that was bigger than my own personal struggle to make sense out of the space on my canvas, took hold of my work rather spontaneously . This acceptance of the multiple as a basis for organizing a painting lead me through an evolution, where all conflict seemed to create a sort of delirium that lead to its disappearance.  The goal of the painting was to listen to it as a whole.

"At Sea"(private collection Paris)
One of a series of split images facing off

"The Arrow" 1995

"Mulch
Late 90's with a sense of multiplicity.i.e. "thinking out of the multiple not reduction"

"Footprints" Late 90's

View of world of the war of all against all.Late 90's

1997 "Sargasso Sea"
I used to see this as some sort of biological soup but now wonder if this was my first attempt at using writing in my work.

Using icing applicator I mark time and wait.Trying to jump out of the war of all against all
mid 2000's( New York Collection)

An event takes place as I am waiting(private collection Massachusetts)

Since 2000 I have pursued an art that abandons the languages that I had so assiduously acquired over many years. I began with a flat surface of dots and expanded the affects of that vocabulary incrementally over time: adding wax to bring the paint off the surface, dripping the paint off the bottom of the canvas, using more and more color combinations, applying paint with a frosting applicator to bring back the volume that I had abandoned in my move from figuration to abstraction and reviving the figure/ground ambiguity by playing variations in the center off of the sides. Most recently, I have abandoned that sort of centrality to an all-over approach, where no one area has primacy over any other in order to foreground the freedom of each mark. I am hesitant to try to apply any of Schurmann or Heidegger’s concepts to describe my work; for fear that one might think that my paintings are conscious attempts to apply their theories. If there is an influence it is indirect. Poiesis, the evolution of the painting over time is probably relevant. Primordial time embodied in the work itself which is unforced. The embodiment of the “while”, not time engaging an imposition but of letting 

Ekstasis of Repetition.2013

These more recent works use letters as a basis to build the paintings.This straddling of two cognitive realms is another ecstasis and was unexpected.It seems to contradict my earlier emphasis on phusis over against  the verbal realm. Did I jump back into enframent?

#99 2021

N.B.Rubinstein has subsequently mentioned in "Art in America" that I coined the phrase: 
Zombie Formalism.

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The nihilist condition and provisional painting a la Rubinstein

Flannery O’Conner stated that you could not understand the modern world without understanding nihilism’s central role in moving and shaping modernity.  She said it was the air we breathed. As a Catholic I assume she felt that we cannot base the way we live on either the positivism of science or superficial societal strictures of what is good and bad. I am not very knowledgeable about Catholic doctrine but I know unlike the Protestants they believe in original sin and from what I recall of St Augustine’s “Confessions” you can only overcome it through the grace of God. To say that we are all nihilists is tantamount to saying we start out our lives as fallen from grace.

That a devout Catholic living in the conservative 1950’s South should find herself as Andy Warhol’s intellectual bedfellow only proves the pervasiveness of the nihilistic strains that permeate our world. These nihilistic experiences seem to hit us from different directions but genealogically have the same origin. Warhol’s fame as an artist was due to his understanding of the role that mass media played in our perception of self; that we are no longer individuals relating to a small community but have been abducted by alien forces as it were into the universe of the electronic media. If O’Conner can acknowledge the nihilism of society and express its fallenness, then could it be said that Warhol shares with her the same sense of our fallen condition and sees our mediated condition as a false transcendence?

So how to connect the dots that place O’Conner and Warhol in the same nihilistic world? Warhol picked up that mass media provides a sort of transcendence to the ordinary. On the one hand to be lifted up out of one’s existence and forced into the media is like being reborn in the human condition, a double dose of nihilism and fallenness. The fifteen minutes of fame implies transcendence of our mortal coils but only for a moment before we fall back into the banal. Is Warhol a theologian
of banality?

When I wrote about Guyton and Kassay, in my article on Zombie Art, who produce ice-cold replicas of High Modernist art, I detected that the only way to get a grasp on these artist’s success was to see the correspondence between the nihilist air we breathe and their total lack of anxiety about being a simulacrum of another person’s style. I threw in some gratuitous rhetorical flourishes, that painted these artists as being a sort of cultural dead end. But if you are a nihilist then dead ends are where you want to be. Especially when you take Stella’s work, which is part of the scientifically based positivist strain of modernism that looks for building blocks, “sine qua non”s and relation of parts to the whole, and then bleed it dry so that the copy is a pale memory of the original. What is intriguing is that there are contemporary artists who paint images similar to Guyton, but who are descendants of the positivist line of Held, Stella and de Kooning. David Row and Craig Stockwell are two artists who come to mind. In the case of Row his work has its origins in Held and de Kooning. In Stockwell I see Brice Marden. I think they want the viewer to visually and intellectually experience an event, a movement of rhythms in time and space, painting that still captures the energy, like the events  that are caught on an x ray in a scientific experience. It is very Aristotelian. Concepts like energy, time and movement are crucial to their self-understanding. 

 

Dave Row

Craig Stockwell

But the art scene moves quickly and although these descendants of High Modernism are successful, they are not at the center of the cultural radar. The name of Raphael Rubinstein comes up often as an apologist for a new movement he calls “Provisional Painting”. Around the end of the last decade, he noticed a distinct artistic style, when he made the rounds of galleries and artist’s studios in New York. It was abstract (Mary Heilmann, Aldrich), mildly ironic(Christopher Wool) and unabashedly derivative (Stanley Whitney) and in no way wanted to surpass its influences. He curated a show on the abstraction of the 80's this past year at Cheim and Read to convey that this movement was more than just a recent phenomena, but had its antecedent  in the work of for example Joan Snyder and Jonathan Lasker, although some  such as Snyder are incredibly earnest and only look provisional. I suspect, that like Greenberg’s ideas on abstraction in the Fifties, it got codified and became a self -fulfilling prophecy, where the artists outside of the movement (if you can call it that) start to think that this is the new wave to emulate and its ideas begin to infect the academy and its MFA mills.

Stephen Mueller

What I find astonishing is there is no reference to nihilism in the samples of his writing, that have appeared on line. If he had read Vattimo, a contemporary Italian philosopher, who came up with the notion of "weak thought" or "weak ontology", he would have understood the NY scene deductively, so that what was happening in NY, was already part of the nihilistic universe that Flannery O’Conner observed. The post–modern condition has its source in Nietzsche’s vision that God is dead, which takes on more meaning if you see that he also sees that metaphysics or any vision of the world where there are absolute truths is dead. However, as a hermeneutician, Vattimo thinks that thought is backward looking as well as forward looking, so that it will never abandon the metaphysical tradition completely. The metaphysical past will always haunt us as something that is still embedded in our language and institutions. Is not this what is happening with “Provisional Painting”? The edict, that was handed down from on high that painting is dead, meant that painting as embodying metaphysical absolutes was past. But can we stop painting? Can we stop interpreting the past? Is the will to say something about one’s experience of the world at an end and is not abstraction in its manifestations in the 20^th century full of bits and pieces of language that we can “bricole” with. You don’t have to espouse the absolutism of Held or Stella to borrow from their playbook. Vattimo says that traces of that metaphysics linger that are absolutely crucial to our existence. We can still believe in the power of the self to envision the world without espousing a powerful sense of Being and Truth, hence “weak ontology”.

 

Mary Heilmann

Jonathan Lasker

I think working inductively creates problems for Rubenstein, when he tries to extrapolate back to Matisse, Bonnard and Giacometti the provisionality of his acolytes. He sees an erasure in Matisse and assumes he is only problematizing what he is doing. But Matisse’s work grew out of a quest for scientific truth, where color has power to push and pull optically. He created positive visual events as does Row and Stockwell, and, if he erases something, it is only to bring him closer on his path to a cognitive whole. Genealogically, the late cutouts of Matisse lead right into Rothko and on to the minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly. Giacometti struggles to pin things down from his existential point in space .The more he tries to capture what he sees, the further away it moves from him. Nothing provisional about that. He is a phenomenologist of the experience of man under the Lacanian gaze of the other. The world provisional sounds so flaccid. How can you not feel the deep anxiety and sense of failure in Giacometti’s work? Some of the contemporary artists thrown into this bag of provisionalism tell Rubinstein there is nothing provisional about their work. But little of Giacometti’s angst is to be seen in the artists that Rubinstein espouses. Vattimo’s “weak thought” would be a perfect concept to encapsulate where painting is in Rubinstein’s provisional world. Vattimo sees a weak connection to Being in a positive light as a sort of enlightened nihilism. As in Richard Rorty’s world, we at best bounce off of each other interpretively and creatively, to establish horizons of meaning without insisting that our values are superior.  Vattimo even claims that these are the characteristics of Nietzsche's Superman. When taken in the context of what Malcolm Bull sees as Vattimo’s misunderstanding of Nietzsche, we can see that the problem with provisionalist painting today is the ironic weakness it espouses.

 

Schnable and Aldrich

For Nietzsche interpretation is evidence of the will to power.” It is a means of becoming the master of something.” Bull says: ”Interpretive failure occurs when someone  ‘no longer has the strength to interpret’ for ‘exhaustion changes the aspect of things, the value of things’. For Nietzsche interpretation and value creation are inseparable. Whereas the strong ‘involuntarily give to things and see them fuller, more powerful and pregnant with future… the exhausted diminish and botch all they see-they impoverish the value’. It is hard to knock a movement that controls the gallery scene and gets top dollar for its work, but it is only in the context of galleries with high ceilings that the work takes on any heft. 

 

Stanley Whitney

In a “Brooklyn Rail” interview Rubinstein sees the provisional movement as a reaction to the slickness of work by Currin, Koons and Murakami. I have observed this sort of reactive event in the New York scene several times over. Chuck Close comes to New York looking to stand out from the minimalist crowd, and, according to  an urban legend, espouses photorealism as a means to this goal. Neo- Expressionists react to minimalism and some of them like Schnable survive to be part of the provisionalist reaction to world wide corporate slickness. So it goes the agonic battle between generations. To know that it all functions under the umbrella of nihilism would be a good critical tool that would help critics understand the different strains of nihilism and maybe put the fire in the belly of the next generation to overcome the shadow it casts on all we do.

Snyder

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