Conceptual Handles on Zombie Formalism published in Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today

 

Conceptual Handles on Zombie Abstraction

Martin Mugar

I wrote three blogposts on Zombie Formalism over a five-year period. The first at the end of 2012 described my encounter with John Yau’s article in Hyperallergic where he sensed a failure in new abstraction to cut out new territory remaining solely imitative of High Modernism. I then tried to bring the style under the rubric of nihilism and akin to the work promoted by Raphael Rubinstein under the title of “Provisional Painting”. These two chapters are a hugely edited version of my online posts. The following is the genesis of my thinking along the trail of Zombieism.

1. The first use of the notion of Zombie Abstraction

In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Ernst Tugendhat and other the Twentieth Century philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of Western metaphysics. First Charles Taylor, in a heading, states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model, and its basic error is to construe conscious- ness as a relation to an object.” The author in the first paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: “the subject as starting point, just as orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective communi- cation in language the new universal system of reference.” A few paragraphs later he says: “The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.1 It is interesting to unpack this in relation to the transition to abstrac- tion at the beginning of the last century, and in particular a rather recent recycle of minimalism that is cropping up in New York gal- leries and has received an imprimatur by the Whitney Museum with a mid-career show of Wade Guyton, one of its practitioners. It pro- vides an insight into the endless politics of suspicion that permeate so much of Western culture over the last century and in particular painting.2 The ambition for the thinkers quoted above is to liberate our consciousness from a subjectively based consciousness that for various reasons is beholden to visuality. The first manifestation of this subjectivity or the “mental eye” was first seen in the realism that commenced in the Renaissance with the use of perspective and then in the Baroque with chiaroscuro. It reigned confidently over painting

45

until the end of the Nineteenth Century. This mental eye was built out of clear notion of a strong subject, that shaped via a scientific understanding of perceptual processes, the world that surrounded the artist. The imposition of the gaze of the individual on what surrounded him seemed to parallel the thymotic excesses of Western Civilization as it objectified via science and capitalism the whole world. The image of the conquistador Lope de Aguirre in Werner Herzog’s classic film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) descending the Amazon river and con- quering solely with his imperious gaze all that he surveyed is probably the most emblematic image for me of this attitude. A rather powerful bit of information to support this notion of Western consciousness is that the perspectival system of the Versailles gardens radiated from the bed of Louis XIV. Sartre has a lot to say about the withering gaze of his grandfather, who was an old-world authoritarian type. The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in the Twentieth century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s essay Downcast Eyes (1993). To make his point about the domination of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating insight and mirroring. “Even a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors. If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for these deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight int the complex mirroring of perception and language”. Zabala goes on to say: “If the old philosophy only referred to what could be seen clearly, the new philosophy refers only to what can be clearly communicated”.3 Richard Rorty, as well as Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Jay, call this transformation Linguistic Turn. Science required that objects be placed under the scrutiny of the researcher and submit to the scientific method. A strange amalgam of suspicion and arrogance worked together in a mighty cabal to turn the world inside out. A naive acceptance of the world as it is presented on a day-to-day basis was replaced by a vision that the world must be founded on a more solid basis through the power of logos. The world became transformed into a series of topics: geology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, grammatology, and so on and so forth.4

The first crack in that stranglehold on the Real appeared in the phe- nomenological studies of Edmund Husserl. Martin Heidegger has a phrase that always carried a lot of significance for me: “immer schon” (always already). If we act on the world in a certain way, we are always already in it as a participant with other people using a language that we did not create. The pure cogito was immediately problematized. Our relation to things is not one of subject to object, but a more shared engaged reality of being in the world. His word for that reality was

46

Dasein, which roughly translates as “being there”.
This became the start of a hundred years of philosophers trying to decenter the scientific gaze by deconstructing the language of met- aphysics, with each new generation of philosophers accusing the previous one of still being subject to it. Wittgenstein added to this deconstruction by moving our focus away from the metaphysical to an analysis of how we use language in the real world. During the most recent era of french deconstruction one adjective that you didn’t want attached to your ideas was “logo-centric”. Initially, the problem was that behind the strong ego was the belief in God as the origin of everything in a well-ordered universe, which still supported Descartes’ rationality. After that, everything logical was perceived to be just a trace of that divine belief system, which had to be expunged from wherever in our language it was still hiding. And, of course, it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.
I got off on this tangent after reading John Yau’s article in Hyperallergic about what he called the latest “look” in Abstraction.5 The work of its practitioners, Sarah Morris, Wade Guyton and Jacob Kassay looks very much like the abstraction of Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly, which is decidedly logo-centric. Greenbergian ideas about reduc- ing forms to basic elements and constructing abstract realities went hand and hand with the positivists who believed in the superiority of mathematical language over the language of poets and mystics. “What you see is what you get” Stella is purported to have said. The early spirituality of Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian is gone. These artists are laconic macho painters. They give you the least amount of what might be construed to be a painting and then pull up the ladder behind them. I suspect that this paring down of painting to simple terms embodies in some manner the analytic analysis of language, which reduces language to its grammatical elements and then submits it to validity tests. They want to see how painting functions as shapes on a wall. Or as they loved to say in grad school: does it work.
Already Yau, who is not a fan of these artists, does accept the prem- ise that we should not go back to the days of the gigantomachia of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. And there may be some truth that this generation of artists is too imbued with the culture of deconstruction to attempt to overcome Kelly, Stella and Reinhardt or in the case of Jacob Kassay, Robert Ryman, at least on their own terms. Something else is going on here: there seems to be a need to push painting toward something totally inert, that could be simply part of a common language, no longer power-laden as the last word of something irreducible, which was the goal of Kelly, Reinhardt, and the early Stella. The work of these artists becomes as common as

47

money, just a token of exchange, like baseball cards.6 By shifting the terms of painting away from any lingering notion of being an object and pushing it into the realm of language and in the case of Guyton producing the painting mechanically with an inkjet printer, sets the painting free from its roots in science and objectification.

If the influence of Tugendhat and analytic philosophy is as pervasive as I think it is, the primacy of language theory would give permission to this generation to take painting further down the road to just words and sentences. Rorty, who had his role in this winding down of the metaphysical, critiques Heidegger because “he treats language as a brooding presence rather than as a string of marks and noise emitted by organisms and used by them to coordinate their behavior.” Heidegger placed importance on the ignored verbal copula is that we use without acknowledging its role in grounding our day-to-day use of language in something more numinous. It backgrounds it and in poetry approaches the foreground. In the case of our contempo- rary practitioners of abstraction it has been excised. These works of art look like paintings, act like painting but on closer inspection are as bloodless and lifeless as zombies. Simone Weil said that culture moves in grand arcs either ascending or descending. Assuming the movement is down, could it be we have reached the bottom?

2. The nihilist condition and Provisional Painting

Flannery O’Connor stated that you could not understand the modern world without understanding nihilism’s central role in moving and shap- ing 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 Saint Augustine’s Confessiones 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 gene- alogically 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’Connor 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

48

mediated condition as a false transcendence?
So how to connect the dots that place O’Connor 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, in the past years, I wrote about Wade Guyton and Jacob Kassay, 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 Al Held and de Kooning. In Stockwell I see Brice Marden. I think they want the viewer to visually and intellectually expe- rience 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. But the art scene moves quickly and although these descendants of High Modernism are successful, they are not always at the center of the cultural radar. The name of Raphael Rubinstein comes up often as an apologist for the 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, Richard Aldrich), mildly ironic (Christopher Wool) and unabashedly derivative (Stanley Whitney) and in no way wanted to surpass its influences. He curated the group show Reinventing Abstraction. New York Painting in the 1980s (2013) at Cheim and Read to convey that this movement was more than just a recent phenomenon, but had its antecedent in the work of 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

49

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.
It seems that the metaphysical past will always haunt us as some- thing 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 paint- ing? 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 Twentieth 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. In a Brooklyn Rail interview Rubinstein sees the provisional movement as a reaction to the slickness of work by John Currin, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami.7 I have observed this sort of reactive event in the New York scene from the late Sixties. 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 Julian Schnabel survive to be part of the provisionalist reaction to worldwide 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 gen- eration to overcome the shadow it casts on all we do. 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 dialectic of history provided no zigzag, no way out just more zombification ad infinitum. As said before, 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, a label created by Walter Robinson – just to name a few:Wade Guyton, Mark Grotjahn 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. 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

50

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 (2017) which sees Modernism as an ever-revivified battle against the Prussian state and its reincarnations.8 For sure the scientific community achieved its goals with a group effort but judging from the mid-century portraits of greatness by the Canadian-Armenian photographer Yousuf 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.

Martin Mugar graduated from Yale with a BA cum laude in 1971 and with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1974. Yale also granted him a travelling fellowship to travel in Europe from 1971 to 1972. In 1970 he received a fellowship to study at Yale Norfolk with Philip Guston among several visiting artists. Mugar has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Dartmouth College, The University of New Hampshire, and the Art Institute of Boston. His work can be found in the several public collections such as The Boston Public Library, (Boston), The Danforth Museum, (Massachusetts),The Museum of Modern Art (Yerevan, Armenia), The MIT Museum (Massachusetts), Tufts University Museum (Massachusetts). Mugar has recently writ- ten the book “Drawing and Painting: perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw” (2019).

Note

1 S. Zabala, Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, pp. 1-11.

2 I am mainly thinking about Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the so-called “school of suspicion”. See P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation (translated from French by D. Savage), Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, pp. 32-35.

3 Infra.

4 S. Zabala, op. cit., p. 12.

5 J.Yau,“WhatHappensWhenWeRunoutofStyles”,Hyperallergic,December 3th, 2013: hyperllaergic.com/96934/what-happens-when-we-run-out-of-styles.

6 Asknown,theword“zombie”,andofcourseitsvividimagery,comesupmanytimesin regard to economics and finance. See J. Rushing Daniel, “Art and Capital Have Become Nearly Indistinguishable”, Jacobin, November 15th, 2021: https://jacobin.com/2021/11/ art-market-financialization-commodify-currency-museums-assets-capital.

7 J. Waltemath, “Raphael Rubinstein”, Brooklyn Rail, July 2013: brooklynrail. org/2013/07/art/raphael-rubinstein-with-joan-waltemath.

8 P. Rodgers, The Modern Aesthetic, 9W, New York, 2017, p. 160.

Charles Giuliano's 150 years celebration and survey of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Charles Giuliano

 This document of the 150 year history of the Museum of Fine Arts is mostly cobbled together from interviews by Charles Giuliano of the actors who shaped that history. One of the first is a 1976 interview of a Globe writer who was part of a team that wrote an expose to take down (or so it appeared ) the newly appointed MFA director Merrill Rueppel. It sets the theme of interviews that expose the machinations of behind the scenes struggle between the old guard board and efforts of others to bring new blood into the Museum. Charles has been connected to the Museum soon after graduating from Brandeis when he was employed in the Egyptian department. He stayed close to the museum via these interviews in his role of journalist for multiple Boston newspapers. He clearly has garnered the respect of his interviewees. Considering that he rarely lobs softball questions one might think that it would have been wiser for them to avoid him, but almost fifty years later he brings the reader, without skipping a director, up to the present with an interview of the current director Matthew Teitelbaum. Maybe the numerous directors all felt that they have to post the “Charlie card” on their resume in order to be truly enthroned as director of the MFA. 

 

Getting a conceptual handle on these interviews and the scrutiny they provide in the context of the history that came before, is a bit of a struggle. I fell back for help on the template of a recent book by art critic Jed Perl: Authenticity and Freedom. Authenticity can be seen as meaning tradition and often in Perl’s hand as something numinous and quasi-religious.  A case in point is his use of an anecdote about the musical career of Aretha Franklin. She had her start as a singer in her father’s church choir. She was imbued in the gospel tradition of singing that had a long history in black American culture. When she made the break (freedom) into popular music that tradition was always there to shape her new music. The music had roots. The origin of the MFA as a recipient of invaluable Japanese art at its beginning was similar and had a purity that nothing in the later history of the MFA could match. Its collection of Japanese art was given by bluebloods Morse, Bigelow and Fenellosa who lived in Japan as practicing Buddhists and in their collecting of the Japanese artifacts had eventually received the imprimatur and permission of Japanese collectors and scholars such as Okakura Kakuzo, who in turn became the first curator of the Boston collection. Moreover, Okakura was a world-renowned scholar of Zen Buddhism whose “Book of Tea” is purported to have influenced Martin Heidegger’s understanding of Japanese thought when Okakura studied under him in Germany. The Japanese who were initially shocked by the export of national treasures such as the “Burning of the Sanjo Palace” put a stop to any further expatriation. They eventually accepted it as a way of sharing the Japanese cultural heritage with the world. However, this is to be contrasted with the unseemly attempt to transfer a Raphael from Italy to Boston by Perry Rathbone toward the end of his tenure that necessitated a whole book by his daughter to rehabilitate his reputation. Jan Fontein, director and curator of the Asian collection said that these exchanges with the Japanese were a generation ahead of the ”repatriation movement” .

Money and lack thereof becomes another leitmotif of the book. Bigelow was well off. The Japanese collection was well endowed. Moreover, its cultural value was never questioned. These were cultural treasures by deceased artists. A hilarious anecdote that sheds light on the topic of money in one interview relates the reaction of a French curator of Textiles at the MFA, who lashed out at Alan Shestak in a meeting of curators that he was tired of hearing about money, and that in Lyon, where he worked in the museum, to talk about money was beneath them. He refused to shut up about his opinions and eventually was fired. He refused to leave his office and had to be chased out by the police in keystone cop style. Of course, in France everything is paid for through taxes up front and one never knows the real cost of things. The Metropolitan in New York receives millions from the state of New York. Boston nothing. The National Gallery gets all its money from the government. Expenses always seem to exceed income even during the halcyon days of Malcolm Rogers who somehow increased the endowment but increased the debt at the same time. 

Later in the book a recurring theme is who among contemporary artists should be collected. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the curator of the collection of Indian art (1933-1947) felt that no living  artist should be collected. Problem solved. But the MFA was expected to collect Boston artists, first the Brahmin Boston Impressionists and then the Jewish Boston Expressionists (Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine and Karl Zerbe). A thorough collecting of the latter was obviated due to rampant anti-Semitism. Every curator had their faves. One director liked Hyman Bloom up to a point and another only looked at Color Field but could not tolerate Hans Hoffman. Merrill Reuppel turned down the purchase of Pollock’s “Lavender Mist” which at the time was reasonably priced and was soon acquired by the National Gallery. The turning down of this masterpiece is another recurring theme of lost opportunities, along with the dearth of “modern classics” by Picasso and other cubists. Somehow the MFA never heard of the Armory Show. They would eventually get a Picasso but it was not one of his best. When I taught at UNC-Greensboro they had in their collection one of De Kooning’s women. The story behind its purchase is that it was bought for $5000 dollars and the director was fired for spending too much on it. Unfortunately, such a serendipitous mistake was not made at the MFA. 

What could have been:"Lavender Mist"

 

As a born and bred Bostonian, Charles does a great job of following the vagaries of the city’s economy to which the success of a director and the MFA seemed inextricably tied. The period of the establishment of the Ancient Egyptian, Classical Greek and Roman, Japanese and Indian collections corresponded to the building of Back Bay. The sluggish economy of the 1970s when townhouses in the Back Bay were going for $70,000 weighed heavily on the Museum’s ability to raise money. 

 

To stick with the conceptual structure of Authority and Freedom that Perl provides: i.e. freedom would be  the letting go of the authority of the early collections of Asian art works  with which early curators established their authority at the inception of the MFA.. The freedom might be more related to the necessity of responding to the multiplicity of art forms and styles that in fact the museum has a hard time keeping on top of and on dealing with the issues of racial equity that must be addressed if the Museum is to garner the respect of and truly represent the community. Racial tension has always been a reality in the Boston community that the Museum has mostly tried to ignore and struggled to address. But that is far from the days when housing and displaying the artifacts of ancient cultures were the only worry.  The business side that so upset the French curator did not reduce everything unnecessarily to the big buck but, according to Barry Gaither, adjunct curator of African American Art, the arrival of Seybolt, a so-called uncouth Midwesterner from the business world of Underwood Devilled Ham to the board of trustees, was appalling to some but to him a breath of fresh air. Gaither a black saw himself as another outsider like Seybolt. And when someone mentioned that Rathbone was not a Bostonian, Gaither answered that he was trained at The Fogg. Seybolt a protégé of former MIT president Howard Johnson had strong Washington connections that would become crucial in getting financial contributions from DC to support travelling shows. 

The mostly Brahmin board probably lived in the glow of the MFA’s early days when they were able to keep the museum self-sustaining but not expanding. Keeping the museum up to date, after the market crashed in the late ‘60s, probably required the intervention of the Seybolt/Rueppel regime. The expansion of the US government in the days of the Great Society required that the Museum establish Washington connections belying the vision of the centrality of Boston as the Athens of America. Already left economically behind by New York City it could not blithely ignore Washington DC as a source of money.

 

How will it deal with the virtual museum? The NTP? Just as the advent of Zoom in the age of Covid unexpectedly opened up the possibility of working from home so the virtual museum of the metaverse might do the same to the museum goer. How does the Museum continue to take in revenues in a wide open world of art without walls? And how does racial equity differ from racial equality in its impact on the functioning of the museum within the community? The goal of the MFA should be to exert its freedom by staying ahead of the game and not play "catchup". 

 

What these interviews succeed in doing is conveying the increasing multidimensionality of the Museum over the years from simple roles of storing, curating and exhibiting art, to the never ending need to raise money and the imperative of community outreach. Although at times the directors seem hapless and self-absorbed, they all in their own way add to the success and survivability of the MFA. Charles Giuliano who is one of the few Boston Critics to observe the Boston Art Scene holistically has included in his quiver of accomplishments a global understanding of the MFA. 

Link to buying the book on amazon

 

 

 

The painting of Don Shambroom

 Don Shambroom and his work looms large in my blogging that started in 2012. Mostly his opinions that have been shared with me either at visits to his studio on the Millers River in Massachusetts, via email or comments left on my blog posts. Just a presence that added up over time. What he had to say on culture and art were most often very prescient. He has a knack for thinking deeply about any subject that he decides to focus on. Most recently an interest in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp resulted in the publication of a monograph on Duchamp’s last day published by the David Zwirner gallery. In order to write the book he had to enter and hold his own in the world of Duchamp scholars and chroniclers which was no mean task.   When we first met at Yale and then again when our paths crossed in Boston exchanges were face to face. Since the advent of the internet these exchanges have been hijacked by the web and have become part of the very subject matter of his painting.  

Cow Bird

The imagery of the art world in the 20th c to my eye is torn between a Hegelian systematization and the Kantian sublime. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning define the sublime. Of course, Rothko and Newman deal with the numinous presence of the self and de Kooning with the terror (an aspect of the sublime) of being torn apart but somehow surviving to be reconstituted in the real. For these painters the artist still wields power to move the viewer. These artists represent the part that resists being overwhelmed by the whole. The Hegelian trope can be seen in the part being subsumed in the whole. Here the part can either resist strongly or acquiesce subserviently. I noticed this subservient stand in the work of Dana Schutz. She applies a cubistic language that in the end is not a structure into which parts are grounded in the real but a system that obliterates a meaningful use of the parts. It embodies the postmodern dream of the death of man. We are uploaded to the mediaverse  starting in the 50’s with the tv understood by Marshall McLuhan as messaging through it mediatic structure and coopting our whole physical reality finally on FB or at last dreamed of in the metaverse qua Oculus.  

The artists who no longer resist this effacing of the human presence can be seen in the artistic phenomena of zombie formalism that I was one of the first to talk about. It seems to have grown out of the branch of modernism that does not ground itself in the human body a case in point being Frank Stella whose early graphic design-based work is already one degree removed from embodied perception. 

String Theory 

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe a painter and critic who stumbled across my writing emailed me in direct response to something I had written about the characters in Zombie Formalism. I found it applied to the work of Dana Schutz. His words addressed the struggle of the part and the whole in any Hegelian inspired work of art where the part provides “no bodily surprise” (to quote Gilbert-Rolfe). Nothing that can break out of the whole.  He sent me a link to his writing on the Sublime. The art of Shambroom like any smart artist who wants to find his or herself engaged in understanding the human condition of late modernity has to sort out this Hegelian/ Kantian struggle of the system v.s. the Sublime. Unlike the submission to the systemic like Schutz whose visual world seems to grow out of Saturday morning cartoons or the Zombie formalists who bleed any life out of abstraction, he creates a hybrid of both the intensity of seeing by the artist one on one with things of the world and a systematic world derived from Rauschenbergian space. On the one hand the face, the individual is lifted up into a societal miasma on the other hand things of the world are granted a kind of beauty in their isolation, a stance that exalts their magic of having appeared in time and space. Like a Janus face he looks backward into the 19thc on to the Renaissance and Baroque where the artists were capable of holding up the moment and the thing in its beauteous moment of revelation and on the other absorbing the language of modernism where the human presence is swept up into a higher structure. By straddling the two worlds he is casting doubt on any attempt to see the imagery of mass culture as a superior sort of transcendence as in Warhol, a Hegelian “aufbehung” which ambiguously means both a cancelling and a lifting up. 

Symbolic Drift

This strategy of maintaining both realities side by side without sublimating one into the other, resembles the task that Ernst Junger set for himself. In his writing. He is famous for his WW1 account of trench warfare  ”Storm of Steel” that I recently learned that Don read while attempting in his own scholarly manner  to understand warfare as manifested in WW1 .For Junger WW1  represented a dramatic change in the role of the individual to technology. It is technology that drove the battle not individual acts of heroism. The book had a big influence on Heidegger’s understanding of the growing nihilistic role of technology in 20thc life that he called “enframement” and more particularly ”machination” (that continues to this day in more and more insidious fashion on the internet.)  In my own blogging I have called this transformation the “Humpty Dumpty” effect where the integration of the image of the individual into the whole as we knew it and as it is represented in the art of the west say in the work of Piero or Michelangelo is irretrievably lost as we move into the 20thc. All the king’s horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

John Singer Sargent's "Gassed"

 In the interim between the wars Junger pondered in his writing how the life of the individual might function outside of the political and technological system. achieving in “The Adventurous Heart” an  almost mesmerizing descriptions of the objects of the day to day reality that he encounters sometimes enhanced by drugs. His goal was to describe the surface of the real with such intensity so as to reveal something of a hidden reality. It also represents a shift of weight from the individual subsumed in the political to its own private inner magic. In many ways it parallels the power of many individual artist such as Picasso who functions as free agents outside the system. Or the proliferation of shamanic types in the 20thc century such as Alistair ‘Crowley, Krishnamurti  or Rudolph Steiner who attempt to integrate divinity in a post Christian  era. Another short book written by Junger between the wars “Forest Passage”  posits the strengthening of the individual in connection with the natural world as it steps outside the leviathan. I was taken aback by the first image described in “Adventurous Heart” in overwhelming detail of a tiger lily, which in turn brought to mind a painting by Don Shambroom of a daylily represented in almost stereoscopic detail. There is no postmodern cynicism in this painting. This is not the world of Yuskavage or Currin that keeps pushing the envelope to further dimensions of perversity.  The realm of Blakean innocence finds its place in Don’s openness to the opening of a flower. 

"Circle of the Lustful" William Blake

Shambroom’s art embraces a hybrid notion of the societal whole and the individual as its own kind of whole. He leans on the structure of a visual language derived from Rauschenberg  to insert images of faces known from mass media side by side with those of people in his immediate family. Sometimes there is text given the same weight as the faces and bodies. Interpenetration of the 19thc world of portraiture and that of billboards or flashing internet imagery. Everything is on the verge of overwhelming the individual. A child on a swing is impinged on by graffiti/slogans. What one must remember in observing these paintings is that everything is hand painted. There is the 20thc lingua franca of collage but the 19th c love of paint to represent the here and now. Again we are helped by a seeing Shambroom as hermeneutically orchestrating a sort of clash/crash between two periods of time and two notions of the universe, that seem to have bifurcated irretrievably to which his work  says adamantly No. The dreamscape of people carried along in a sort of cosmic stream seems to remove a purely societal critique and opens up the possibility of a Blakean insertion into a higher spiritual realm. Shambroom’s work can only make sense if seen as issuing from a shamanic magic incantation. An attempt to merge the media images of mass culture with the domestic play of children

Day Lily

Miles Hall who previously interviewed me on my painting has written a sympathetic appraisal of my book on drawing and painting

  Drawing and Painting: Perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw, by Martin G. Mugar  

 While Mugar never mentions the construction of cathedrals in Drawing and Painting, his approach got me thinking about what that might mean in one’s own art and teaching.    

  Humans are tremendously fickle creatures, and sometimes when things go out of style, we have a hard time seeing them for what they are.

   In April of 2019, while the world held its breath and Notre Dame burned, I couldn’t help but think of certain ironies concerning the near universal esteem – or even veneration - being expressed for that cathedral at the prospect of its loss. This in contrast with the ubiquitous scorn the structure was viewed with only two-and-a-half centuries before. In fact, the rise, fall, and rise again in the fortunes of its reputation – from the late Medieval period to the Enlightenment and through to the Romantic era - could be seen as a classic case study of the vagaries of stylistic perception over time.

    The Gothic style’s plunge into disrepute got me thinking about current trends in our perception of Modernism, whose once powerful cache has seen a significant drop in our lifetime. We tend to forget that Modernism wasn’t a monolithic movement or aesthetic, and neither was the Gothic. Rather, the modern period was a century of varying forms where a whole spate of conflicting definitions of art’s essential nature were proposed. Because of its general ideological fervor, our Postmodern eyes tend to see Modernism in hindsight as a highly controlled set of styles, ideas, and institutions. The paradoxical thing is that this race to delineate and limit the parameters of art came out of a desire for freedom from traditional, academic forms and constraints. The early Modernist’s initial impulse was the ambition to build something new from the ground up, not as groups or a collective society (that happened later,) but as individuals. 

     Martin Mugar’s book, Drawing and Painting, grows out of much of the same soil early Modernism did, i.e. the desire to build painting anew, one artist at a time, with individual human eyes. This book places the act of visual perception squarely at the center of both drawing and painting. It encourages the student to cultivate their own cognitive awareness in the act of seeing. Its underlying premise is that vision isn’t just an open window for plundering stylistic preferences or narrative material. It’s not merely a tool in the shaping of our aesthetic or conceptual inclinations, but a deeply significant, ongoing, experiential act, never ancillary. The “eye is always in the process of stabilizing the world” according to Mugar, and the very essence of drawing is grounded in “this ordering of perception.” 

     As I read this book, I was struck by the notion of someone still believing, in very strong and certain terms, that artists can truly innovate through persistent looking, analyzing and feeling. One senses there is still something of the same naive sophistication bouncing around in the author’s head that was present when painters like Monet, Matisse, Braque and Marquet first stepped out into the French countryside to re-discover painting via the observation of nature, or “nature seen through a temperament,” as Zola put it, though I’m guessing Martin might be prone to replace Zola’s use of the subjective term “temperament” with language more firmly grounded in visual function. This is because 150 years later, Mugar’s book is backed up with more cognitive and art historical data, which he mines to make a logical argument for his premise. 

     Martin’s theory emerges out of decades of experience, from both his studio work and his teaching practice. It is informed by his extensive knowledge of Art History and an intense personal interest in philosophy. Alongside this there are specific investigations into cognitive science as it relates directly to certain visual issues. Most all the details of this  knowledge stay in the background however, as Mugar offers up a series of practical exercises. These are laid out as something like arenas for the exploration of vision itself. We are given points of focus, each designed to tap into certain aspects of visual processing. Discoveries are left for the student to unearth through a visual, Socratic question and answer process. Formal issues are dealt with experientially and through looking rather than by describing a particular design concept: Drawing, cutting, collaging, finding negative shapes, using the imagination and redrawing. On the painting side, certain lighting and color parameters are established. There is a strong emphasis on starting out each exercise within its given boundaries, but there is also a feeling that the thoughtful game of chess, once established by those original limitations, could land the student just about anywhere. The destination is not restricted. There are unlimited possibilities in starting from inside those borders. 

      I would be hesitant to strictly call these exercises or assignments, and I doubt they are something to which one could firmly attach a grading rubric of the check-list variety (thankfully.) This doesn’t mean they lack objectivity, as Mugar is a stickler for really making you look at what’s going on in front of you. Caravaggio, Seurat, Cezanne and Braque figure prominently in this book, not for any emphasis on their stylistic flourishings, but because Martin relates certain perceptual functions to what each of these artists did on the picture plane, and how each one saw in new and innovative ways. He orders these exercises according to a different logic of sequence than most teachers I have encountered, starting with those visual processes that happen deeper down in the brain: A nod not only to cognitive science, but to simple intuitive experience as well.

     While Martin doesn’t explicitly stray into the depths of philosophy proper in Drawing and Painting, we get hints of how his knowledge in that field enriches this book. One can see his interest in the thought of Heidegger - or perhaps other flavors of phenomenology and existentialism – permeating the mental atmosphere of its pages. Martin’s approach is also philosophical in this way: he does not offer up recipes or a set of instructions. Even with specific projects given, one must attempt to penetrate the meaning of each working situation he sets up through action and reflection. Though simple and straight forward in some ways, all is left open enough to be somewhat opaque and elliptical in terms of end points. Single sentences can be mined and reflected on for manifold implications. This book will utterly elude and exasperate the student who is looking to memorize technically rehearsed answers for surety and peace of mind. It is not a how-to manual. 

     Drawing and Painting calls us to ask questions, frame inferences, and create something of our own conclusions while being given a partial tour of the territory. The whole map is not handed to us, a priori. Instead, we are initiated into a knowledge of how to navigate the wilderness. What we discover in that wilderness is left up to us. 

 With its compact, elliptical prose this book is somewhat short, and I found myself wanting more. While he dips into certain aspects of perceptual science – the striate cortex was one that was new for me – there are many others that he leaves alone. I went away feeling like other, unmentioned aspects of vision, like depth of field, the fovea, and center surround, could each have had their own set of exercises tailored for them – along with many others. Or did the author decide that in the case of this book, less really was more? This would leave open the possibility that Mugar treats teachers like he does his students, and those things are left for us to figure out in our own curricula. 

     In any event, this is an important and timely book. Much of its significance is its tendency to go against the grain of our present-day reasoning. The algorithm, the template, the prefab architectural plan, these are the spirit of our current artistic age. We are offered an array of various templates which give the illusion of freedom. If followed, no thinking or feeling of your own is required. Sharpen your pencil, measure this, measure that, rinse, wash repeat. 

 Part of the beauty of Gothic cathedrals, and much of the reason we admire them today, is that they were constructed with no architectural plans. Their engineering specs were worked out during the construction process. The builders of  Notre Dame defied gravity by experiment, by an intuitive understanding of their materials and the laws of physics. Drawing and Painting is a call to something similar. It is a call to build painting from the ground up, but in this case through an intimate, experiential knowledge of the laws of visual perception. To some that may seem old fashion. To others, it may be the only new way through.

- Miles Hall, December 3, 2021

Martin Mugar currently resides in New Hampshire. His writing appeared on Painter’s Table. 

Book is available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364

These paragraphs subvert the message of my book when I recall Heidegger's dictum that Western Philosophy does not think

PART TWO: PAINTING

Chapter 1

The cognitive structure of the eye and the road to pure color painting

(An aside on the role of abstract thinking in seeing and art)

Abstraction that is created by the power of the concept to shape and establish structure is visually exciting. When it becomes mechanical, it loses its élan. The concepts that we teach are not new to the world but they are new to the student and the freshness of discovery is part of the experience of drawing and painting. All the concepts that give us space and the objects in it are embedded in the visual apparatus of the eye and mind and when they are uncovered there is often a sense of surprise and enhanced power. The revelation of the concept can carry the student’s work along for weeks, as it seems to magically shape their visual world.

For example, the simple understanding of the underpinning of value in all perception can have a liberating effect on the student who once labored under the misconception that everything has its own technique. “How to paint” the still life or the landscape or portraiture is the title of many an art textbook that can befuddle the student. Even watercolor is best understood as grounded in the perception of light and dark and color and at least should be seen as an extension of ink wash; however, many people love technique and will pay enormous amounts to study with a watercolorist guru with some magic formula that will create the veneer of professionalism. 

On the other end of the educational spectrum and typical of the education I had in the liberated 1960s and ’70s is the idea of the individual as a source of novelty and invention. We were taught to startle and to wow the viewer with something surprising. It often had to be big and bold. I remember a classmate who threw himself through his painting in one blazing gesture of self-expression. To navigate between the cult of the self, premised on the uniqueness of individual vision and the dry concepts of visual technique was a challenge, to say the least. The personal epiphanies about the role of perception in art became my touchstone. 

From the first discovery of the primacy of value, to the role of directional lines, to the reversal of figure and ground and how each would shape my work for months on end was the grounding of my existence first as a student and then as an artist. It often meant moving in territory already trod by others and, within the culture of self-absorption in which I grew up in, I was considered reactionary. Comments about how such and such a style was dead were standard. My freshman design teacher told me that painting was dead when I decided to paint the grill of an Oldsmobile for a design project on the automobile. Take a photograph, he said, to which I replied I don’t have a camera but I can paint. 

In the 1990s, I became engaged in Abstract Expressionism and tried to integrate its concepts into my work. An art history professor at UNH saw abstract expressionism solely as an event in the art historical record and therefore as something that was over and done with. But by pulling this art out of the historical context and seeing its connection to perception makes it accessible at all times to all artists. It isn’t inaccessible but grounded right here in the human brain. In truth, it always astounds me how the major figures of 20th century art work with the gradual liberation of the underlying principles of seeing. Take the example of Cy Twombly mentioned above: His linear work is said to be inspired by ancient Roman graffiti but it can be seen also as a continuum of the gradual liberation of the line from form that began with Cézanne, advanced through Mondrian and finally reaching its apotheosis with the Abstract Expressionists. You have to have Gorky before you have Twombly.

As I write about the role of perception in Western Art I begin to hear the words of Heidegger that most of Western Philosophy does not think, that it is, for the most part, technological. If Mondrian’s work can be seem as having its origin in perception, it could be 

Matisse

seen as only a generalization of perceptual structures. As I stated earlier, the hidden linear structure that Cézanne liberated became the source of Mondrian’s further abstraction. His attempts to reduce everything to the simple language of line filled in with color seems in its seductiveness to pretend to be an underlying metaphysical structure and Mondrian’s theosophical interests seem to support this thesis. But like so much Western thinking it does not doubt in any way its own validity and inevitability. 

Matisse’s life long reduction of color from its Impressionist roots to the color cutouts can seem some sort of triumph over complexity. But when seen as being propped up by the ability of the eye to simplify complex value into shape it appears purely technological. Al Held’s “Big N” is a play on shape recognition that jumps out of abstraction into letter recognition from a low level to a higher level of cognition but it does not say “So what.” This is in keeping with the Humpty Dumpty theory where for example the liberated lines of Cézanne which are imbedded with color and planes and a feeling for the holistic pull of gravity become an end in itself in the work of Mondrian and devolve into a kind of quirky liberated gesture in Twombly. But the whole that was still attempted in Cézanne is abandoned. We are left with a pile of parts that can’t be put together again.

(Link to a blogpost from the mid-nineties on the primacy of perception that I critique here)

Link to buy book on Amazon