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

          Leibniz  Entelechy  Modernism

Martin Mugar

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

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

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

Martin Mugar

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

Dennis Hollingsworth 

 

                                                          

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

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

Dennis Hollingsworth

Martin Mugar 

Outside the Walls, a meditation on the contemporary scene

 One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think that it’s going to be just like it is now, only worse.

—Andy Warhol, America

It’s sort of my philosophy—looking for the nothingness. The nothingness is taking over the planet.

—The Andy Warhol Diaries

 Art outside the Walls

These quotes followed the byline of Gary Indiana’s hit job on Blake Gopnik’s “Warhol” in Harper’s. I was directed to the article by Jed Perl after I sent him my blogpost on his “Calder” that compared their two mega tomes that were published this year. In that blogpost I pointed out that Calder uploaded his metaphysics of form into the popular culture and Warhol took “pop” culture and downloaded it his work. I thought that was rather clever of me! 

 Judging from the above quotes I thought that the Harper’s article might deal with the subject of nothingness in the work of Andy. The second quote seems to be a paraphrase of Nietzsche’s famous quote about how the wasteland grows. In an earlier essay I referred to Warhol as an acolyte of the church of contemporary nothingness. 15 minutes of fame was all the transcendence we would know in life. In a brief exchange with Gopnik on twitter when Gopnik’s book first came out I got gopnik to read the above-mentioned essay, which he found interesting but wrong. He went on to praise Koons as the successor to Warhol. He used the term aesthetic agnosia as Koon’s contribution the world of art. Aesthetic agnosia is a sort of brain damage that disallows as it were the recognition of an object. Does Koon’s cause brain damage or is the use of the term meant to describe Koon’s rendering of his objects inaccessible to normal aesthetics. Is not nihilism just an expansion of our notion of what is aesthetic. There seemed to be a resistance on Gopnik’s part to my attempt to see Warhol as a priest of the religion of nothingness. Based on the above quotes Warhol was no philosophical neophyte. 

The Indiana piece surprisingly did not deal with nihilism despite the quotes but was a rather straightforward essay on a book that seems to be a rehash at  best and badly written at the worst.

Over the years artists have left comments on my blog insisting that the so-called nihilistic tendencies of Zombie Formalism provided just another tool in the artist’s toolbox to make interesting art. These comments were framed in a sort of resentment that the use of the term nihilism that has such mean connotations should be applied to the postmodern phenomena of neo-abstraction. I never said that such art was off limits but rather that is had consequences. And made it difficult for an artist to engage the work of the visual powerhouses of Pollock, Gorky, Rothko and de Kooning in a sort of visual battle in the way they had engaged Picasso, Miro and Kandinsky in their work. Raphael Rubinstein named it ‘provisional painting’ and Sarah Butler named it casualist painting, both monikers implying a rather open-ended attitude toward painting, on the one hand not aggressively reductive and on the other not reaching for a Hegelian self-overcoming. I once lauded her strategy of putting that kind of painting in a negative dialectic with modernism. A handle for art critics to grab on to. Addison Parks in Boston put together a show called “the severed ear” that seemed to say abstraction is a visual language that need not be only a noisy gigantomachia but should be spoken as it were to describe day to day experiences. He included the witty deconstruction of Richard Tuttle and the private narrative of a life lived in the art of Tim Nichols. In the case of Parks, he just liked that kind of painting as it seemed to allow for more autobiography. In the case of Rubinstein it seemed to be a sort of weak Hegelianism influenced indirectly by the philosopher Vattimo’s notion of “weak being.”  Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe references one of the adherents of the provisionalist school Charlene von Heyl in an article he wrote called Teaching What Can’t be Taught” whose work was included in the “Forever Now” show at MoMA. Whereas the show was premised on the end of dialectics and history where in the lingo of Fukuyama the same ideas just get recycled, Jeremy puts her in a world of just good painting, where quoting Herbie Hancock on playing with Miles Davis: They just got it right as the music was playing itself. 

For me I cannot shake the creative explosion of the Impressionists and its seminal effect on Modernism. It seemed based on a deeper cognitive notion of how our eye/mind shapes the world and I probably rather naively thought that more and deeper insights could be drawn from that period in time. Reading the work of cognitive scientist David Marr in the late 80’s it even seemed possible to come up with an abstraction that went deeper or somewhere else. Svetlana Alpers who was introduced to my book on drawing and painting had read his work but had not predicted the same radical conclusions. Serendipitously I learned that a colleague of Alpers at UC-Berkeley Whitney Davis had such hopes and expresses his disappointment in an interview from “Farewell to Visual Studies” edited by James Elkins et alia.  But the postmodern equivocation of cultural and scientific insights made it impossible to construe anything world changing of the visual in his work. Scientific culture has been problematized as purely a Western phenomenon on par with the world views of other cultures. As well as our popular “pop” culture.  In the mean-time social issues so dominant in the thirties and forties of the last century have overtaken temporarily the commercial world of art. Interestingly enough the book which is collection of discussions on the role of Visual Studies at the University level there are scant references to contemporary artists. 

I have been led to repeat some territory already covered in earlier blogposts and in my book as a prelude to writing about a show of a former student she put together in Black Mountain NC. Such a portentous place where Albers taught painting and Charles Olson taught poetry. I said I could not promise that it would be sympathetic and mentioned my review of a show by Lorraine Shemesh, who I was a student with at Tanglewood with Philip Pearlstein as the artist in residence. Just had this flash that she does underwater Pearlstein’s. In any case I used it a pretext for the impossibility of what could have been very romantic paintings but placed a barrier between the seer and the seen. And talked about the romanticism of Edwin Dickinson that was so 19thc with its Shakespearean notion of the seer.

The art world is so beholden to the historical and its Hegelian version that it is absolutely impossible to get recognition if you are outside the zeitgeist or in some way either evolving with it the dialectics or consciously rejecting them. A former student talked about an interesting exchange with Roberta Smith and her husband Jerry Saltz on the relationship of his art to the contemporary scene. Although Saltz came across as the mensch he plays on twitter, he peremptorily dismissed this student’s involvement in painting the figure in the landscape as overdone in the art world and not worth talking about. This is without seeing the student’s work. I have found the notion of a personal journey in art that might conjure up some necessary interactions with art of the past crucial to being an artist. IN the 90’s I was soaking up and applying so much AbEx only to be told by an art historian at UNH that it has already been done. The harsh constraints imposed by the academicians on the individual artists.

Despite attempts to contemporize the show with its title “The feminine gaze” and have it carried along by notions of the diversity of a women’s gaze like all art the medium is the message. Moreover, the strength of the work lies in the success with which each artist uses their respective mediums. Fortuitously Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in the above quoted essay cites Paul Valery who felt that ceramics was the highest form of art as it involves the possibility of the piece blowing up in the kiln. This possibility haunts Melisa Cadel’s work reinforcing a notion of the fragility of the human ego and the human body. The ego seems strengthened in the ceramic of the bald head empowered by the wreath of bloodied hands. The reference to a native American headdress works in that the role of feathers is to empower the wearer with the power of the bird from whence they came. Or are  they “scalps”  of past conquests. People get bloodied in her work; there is a man presumably killed by a victorious woman. No matter how adversarial the images seems in the end  the bald headed woman surrounded by her conquests seems to speak to vulnerability. Is the work about fragility of our human conquests? The hoody that is flat on the floor  might be a reference to wife killer Carl Andre whose work was often placed in the same manner on the floor? I have lately been reading about Cormac McCarthy and his classic "Blood Meridian" that someone described as a mix of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and Melville's "Moby Dick". Is this ceramic head that of Judge Holden the scalper?

Cunningham and Bessac

Angela Cunningham has learned marvelously the techniques of verisimilitude. Realism’s evolution from the Early to the High Renaissance results in an increase in the recognition of individual personality in portraiture. Angela understands the connection between oil painting technique and the uniqueness of each person’s face. In the Mannerists that precision becomes “mannered” and less precise. Angela stops before that stage. The technique of chiaroscuro perfected by Caravaggio leaps beyond the mannerists and is where Angela chooses not to go. She feels at home in the seamless connection of body and face that playing around with black and white might undermine. So different from John Currin an artist who used classical techniques only to mock their ability to describe a self.

                                                      Cadel and Cunningham

Anne Bessac makes that leap using charcoal within the language of chiaroscuro. Functioning on the borderline of using black and white both as abstraction/flatness and the voluminous allows her to achieve an energy that is reminiscent on the one hand of Richard Serra’s abstract charcoal drawings and Jim Dines figurative drawings. This juggling of the two directions that the use of value can take the viewer gives her work a great deal of visual sophistication.  The faces are suppressed in favor of the bodily presence. Like those two artists she “values” the white of the page incising the marks made by the line into its whiteness. The woman’s monumentality reference the earth mothers of prehistoric times. 

                                                                  Cadel and Bessac

Although the works in this show are a vehicle for the contemporary political agon of feminism they show a reverence for both the material used and the historicity of the visual languages. They are hermeneutical. They reach back into the past to see how those languages can be used as platforms for contemporary narratives.

                                                                     The above work can be seen at the: 

                                                                     Flood Gallery, Black Mountain, NC

                                                                  “Diverse, The Contemporary Female Gaze”

                                                                      November 15, 2020-January 31, 2021

                                                                               

                                                                            carlos@floodgallery.org

 https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2021/02/17/the-feminine-gaze/ A critique more focused on the artists

followed by a thoughtful comment by Anne Bessac 

Artists without faces. Or what do you hang your hat on? Jean Gabin, Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.

                         Artists without faces.

               Or what do you hang your hat on?

          Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.

.

Jean Gabin:"We had faces then"

"We had faces then." Words that describe the Hollywood actors of Gabin’s era: Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to name a few. What does it mean to have a face? A sense of fate etched into the face, when you accept the persona which is one part what life casts across your bow and the other part  how you deal with it. Maybe grounded in the singularity of Christ’s body and face on the cross as he fulfills his unique destiny/apotheosis in a discrete moment in time. Or the heroes and heroines of the Iliad born to families that already doom them to a fate beyond their control. Does not apply to Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, who still looks like to me the pre-adolescent he was one in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”. Too much a baby face to my taste for his gangster roles and Johnny Depp who always intrigued me with his performances in “Ed Wood” and “Edward Scissorhands” is not growing old gracefully. Unlike Gabin he won’t find a role  for an aging personality that Gabin created in “The Dominici Affair”. Nor will Jim Carrey transcend his iconic roles in “The Truman Show” and “The Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.  In this postmodern age the self is dischargeable, it carries not burden of debt;  it has no beginning, middle and end. Things seem to bog down in the middle. We are more Buddhistic now! Or transcendental meditators like Carrey. …In our culture if our image is no longer pretty to the public then we had rather euthanize ourselves than seem less than perfect. OK, acting is a job and your face is what you sell. But there seems to be a way that some careers transcend that purely mercenary definition. Their way of persisting to the bitter end.

Grant and Bergman

 From Wikipedia on Dietrich:

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer. Throughout her long career, which spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s, she continually reinvented herself. 

Dietrich

It might be that Hollywood no longer likes it characters to age (obviously Weinstein, the gatekeeper, liked his women young) or is it so pervasive that our society cannot accept the wisdom that comes with age. The notion of the self consistently prevailing over or outwitting  death has disappeared in our throw away culture.

                                   Belmondo did his own stunts barely surviving them

What to hang your hat on?  Nothingness?  This strange sort of erasure has oozed into the painting world. Three cases in point: Dana Schutz, Cecily Brown and John Currin.

When I wrote my seminal piece on “Zombie Formalism” I started the essay discussing some philosophical ideas that are current in academia that may be the underpinning of this new notion of self-erasure:

Gabin

“In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s  “The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Tugendhat and other 20^th c 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 consciousness 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 communication 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”.”

This is the end of the central role played by the Socratic notion of knowing thyself. Further along in the essay I write:

“The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 20th century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s “Downcast Eyes”. 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.”

The dethroning of the male gaze.

“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.”

Schutz

What struck me about Dana Schutz at her Boston ICA show beyond the obvious hip ”in your face” cartoony funk of the brush stroke was the un-thought out color palette. It seemed to arise out of a beginner’s paint kit of ochres and umbers with a few primary colors thrown in as spice. There was no self-doubt or even a bow to the exploration of 20thc color's ability to move the viewer. It seemed to come right out of the tube. I pointed out in my Schutz essay how in Kirchner and Beckman, who could be considered precedents of Schutz, set off the human gaze against the acid color as in  Kirchner's case or with aggressive cubism as in Beckmann’s, that both try to dissolve it. Instead of seeing the erasure or distortion of the face as a fault or lack maybe it is just the final exit of a Shakespearean/Socratic/Christian self-consciousness. The self-consciousness that arises out of the inevitability of sin or as one sees in the American Westerns the plodding perseverance of the actor who in spite of the burden of sin tries to do good and in the end can etch something substantial into the human gaze.

Currin's cloning 

But we are postmodern. We gain our identities by being part of the group/herd or experiencing no separation between the mass media and the self. Hence the cartoon faces in Schutz’s work. Currin has faces, indeed, but with his ironic gaze deconstructs the vanity of women who imagine themselves to be unique fashion plates into generic good looks. Warhol bequeaths the face to the replicability of the silk screen. But still with the recognizability of the movie star or politician of the larger culture. The persona that still might seduce us with the magic of a Dietrich or of a Garbo is in the clammy hands of Currin devoid of magic, never star quality but intentionally cloned. The snark of a scientist looking at the world through a microscope, the human entity now subject to the replication of a virus.

Cecilly Brown adds her physical presence to her work

The best abstraction acknowledges a self that is not necessarily synonymous with the human face yet tries to achieve the steadiness of a gaze constantly undercut by the psychological and bodily drives. Gorky, Pollock, Rothko had fragile mastery of those underlying forces. Our contemporary practitioner of abstract art Cecily Brown suffers from what Baxandall perceived to be the weakness of so much late 19^th c Realism. It was not grounded in the self but was merely descriptive of the current social world. The artists of the Salon painted identifiable landscapes not their perception of them. Brown thinks herself to be an abstract painter who paints abstractions in the tradition of Pollock and de Kooning but like Schutz she never thought twice about the dynamics of color and the tension of flattened space. There is no hovering of the neural matrix over the void that one finds in Pollock, the angst of Rothko knowing his colors hide the reality of one’s nothingness or Gorky’s incredible synthesis of the languages of psychology(surrealism)  and Cubism that tear at each other like angry cats. With Brown it is not zombie formalism but flaccid “Descriptive Abstraction” similar to the dead end of late Salon figuration of the 19thc. All great abstraction takes a bow to Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" with its violent flattening of space and his outrageous imposition of his portrait on the women.I am reminded of  a discussion I had with Al Held of a portrait that Matisse did of his wife that he so much admired. A compression of foreground and background that releases an explosion of energy. 

I once imagined a day when the earthy angst of the early work of Lester Johnson would matter more to our culture than what Blake Gopnik sees as the radicality of a Warhol. Yes! radical in that it uproots the human presence from any authentic meaning on earth. Once pulled away from the body and inserted into the matrix of mass media, it will never be radical in the true sense of the word again. It will roll on and on like tumbleweed over the modern desert. Still waiting for someone to create a radical art that is faithful to its real definition  that it  is “rooted” in the human presence.

Otherwise what is there to hang your hat on.

if you are interested in learning more of my ideas on art get my book on Drawing and Painting

Ahab, the Pequod and Frank Stella at the Whitney

Frank Stella

It is interesting that Stella has a retrospective at the same time that  Zombie Formalism is reigning supreme in the contemporary art scene. The shadow of Stella’s early painting haunts their work and functions as a ground upon which these artists build their imagery. But it is not a ground with which they engage in a dialogue or agonic surpassing but a blatant copying. Whereas Stella’s work cut itself away from the Cartesian doubt of most Modernism and cut out for itself a role of being emblematic of the modernist and positivistic hegemony of America triumphant, the Zombie Formalists express a sort of redundancy where the present keeps repeating itself in a circular loop: Stella ad infinitum.

Sarah Morris

Mark Grotjahn

Stella makes it easy for abstractionistas to fall back on his work as a formula for “abstraction making”, in that he already excised color and form from their grounding in the perception of reality. Instead of a panoply of color that works dynamically out of the complexity of color perception, he uses a rules based strategy limiting their number and form as though pre-selected from a color-aid pack. This simplicity of color choice goes hand in glove with a simplicity of form. Moreover, his self-consciousness early on about the shape of the rectilinear canvasses’ relationship to the forms conveyed within, leads easily to taking the form making from the canvasses shape. Again,, it is his ignorance, willed or otherwise, about how colors interact with each other that frees him up to deal with the canvas as abstract form. I recall years ago meditating on his black canvases and realized that this absence of any activity of push and pull between colors resulted in the objectification of the canvas leading to the canvas beings perceived as a shape on a white wall. Object among other objects, including the humidity meter.  An absence of a metaphysical pointing out from the canvas to another realm keeps the canvas in a pragmatic world of just being a physical shape on the wall.  You can see this same strategy pursued by Ellsworth Kelley, who eventually deconstructs the support reinforcing its materiality, which is not the road Stella goes down. He could have gone there but for the haunting of the majesty of Baroque painting that turns him toward a pursuit of complexity and expansion off the wall out into space. He identified more with the overweening confidence of those Baroque artists than with the self-reflexive doubt that motivated the early Modernists. The artists of Rome had the majesty and power of the Church to buoy them up. Stella had the absolute domination of a positivist scientific world view promulgated by the most powerful nation in the world to launch him into an enormous expending of materiel.…

Frank Stella

An understanding of the relationship of Stella to his own antecedents is clarified by studying his influence on his descendants, the Zombie Formalists. Stella and the Zombie Formalists ignore core aspects of their sources. Stella abandons the optical self-reflection that formed the core of Mondrian’s artistic progress in order to use color as just shapes to play with. Within the paintings of the Zombie Formalists any notion of play found in Stella is abandoned so as to foreground a ghostly use of Stella as commodity. Interestingly enough, working backward hermeneutically from the dry commodification of the Zombies, the playful aspect of Stella in contrast seems to become a more salient aspect of his work. It is as a whole the product of "homo ludens" and is therefore more optimistic and out of sorts with the cold cynicism of the zombie zeitgeist. The retrospective seemed out of sync on so many levels with our times and lead me to understand why even the goofy playfulness of  Koons has to be couched in postmodern cynicism to be successfully marketed in this day and age.

Frank Stella

Derrida coined the term hauntology (a play on ontology) to express how the past informs the present in a post-ideological world. The enormous crucial battles of civil and individual liberation are over; there is just the road of ever more efficient technological functioning and communication. Heroic notions of humanity or the working class fade away as an ever more wired society keeps mankind integrated into the mechanism of the industrial state. Since the priority of this state of being is ever more efficient functioning, it is in its interest to obliterate any connection to the past that could slow it down. Although other modes of being that once existed come back to “haunt” the present, and we can try them on or play around with them, they do not define our essential mode of being in the world. Or maybe they can only be recycled in the current cynical mood as Stella has been by the zombie formalists or as John Currin does with the style of the populist Thomas Hart Benton.  The goal is to empty them of meaning so that ultimately private domains once explored in painting cannot escape being mechanized or function ever again as possible sources of individual self-realization.

"The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam" Frank Stella 1993

Melville’s story of the great white whale is often seen as a study and critique of capitalism. Ahab is only interested in his private quest and is clever and manipulative enough to convince his crew to go along with him. Melville is somewhat ambivalent about the morality of this exploitation as he feels we all exploit someone below us even as we are exploited. In my reacquaintance with the book several years ago what struck me was that the crew and Ahab are two different species of mankind. The crew is close to its surroundings ever ready so as to react to changing circumstances. When a sailor is knocked overboard on the shuttle out to Nantucket, Queequeg without prompting jumps into the icy November waters to save him. The crew creates bonds among each other instinctively knowing that their survival depends on being a band of brothers. They feel the palpability of the world as much as Ahab ignores it. For him everything is metaphysically abstract and involves goals that move the crew toward a denouement far from the practical goals of whaling.

There is an analogy I would like to attempt between Ahab's distance from the real and Stella's ignorance of any relationship to the long optical tradition of Western painting. The world is experienced by the crew of the Peqoud with a hands on feel for the things and events around them. For Ahab the world is not experienced in its praxis but is manipulated and ignored in the way Stella’s colors are abstract in the worst sense, derived from color-aid packs, not the way color is experienced in the eye as in Bonnard, Matisse or Cezanne. Stella has left artistically the sensuality of being in the world behind in order to fulfill what he sees as his manifest destiny to occupy more and more space. His formal affects are not achieved as for example in the work of Al Held, but imposed as he piles patterns on top of patterns. This  analogy of Ahab's delirium to Stella’s lack of grounding in the sensual is weak in only one sense: Stella does not live up to the the degree of Ahab's ascetic delirium. The journey he takes us on is neither majestic nor exhilarating. There is no hint at the void that lies under all of his exploits. At most Stella is a good engineer. Ben Davis in his spot on review of the show mentions a thesis Stella wrote at Princeton. Its bearing on his achievement is interesting to mention:

In that long-ago Princeton theses on Pollock and Celtic ornament, Stella claimed that the formula for "art" was pushing decoration to the point where it transcended itself. The knotted pyrotechnics of these final pieces certainly do that—it's actually hard to think of a space where they would work as passive décor. It's just that the direction they transcend decoration towards is the domain of theme parks and Broadway bombast. That is, spectacles built not to savor but to stun, not for connoisseurs but for visitors passing through.

The title of Davis’ essay is “All Style no Substance”. It raises questions about what is substance, what is substantial. The word can be better understood if broken down into “what stands under”. A meditation on what is substantiality and its relation to Stella’s work would be of interest to the connoisseurs and would make an engagement with the work of Stella worth their while if his work were at all engaged in that questioning itself. To savor such a discussion would be to linger, not to pass through.

* an interesting discussion is taking place here: on Henri Art Mag

strange article from 1964 in the New York Times seeing the Nihilism of Stella https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/16/archives/the-new-nihilism-art-versus-feeling.html