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.

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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

Lester Johnson's painting

Johnson 1960's

History has established itself as the final arbiter of the value of the life the artist lives and the art they produce. Having navigated the art scene for over forty years , I have observed that the current manifestation of History’s evolution and the fear of not being part of it has been the cudgel that has been wielded by the arbiters of taste over the head of any poor fool who dares enter the arena of art. 

I have images in my mind from “The Lord of the Rings” of Sauron, art critic, throwing Gandalf , artist into the abyss. This is not a world where sin will send you to eternal damnation; this is where the flavor of the month and whether you know what it is, can make you relevant or irrelevant. To get a sense of how one’s sense of self -worth is predicated on being aligned with “what’s happening”, just sit in on a graduate school critique or witness as I did your favorite class in color and observation get dropped from the curriculum by an administrative hack who wants to offer classes on gender theory.

The historical system that these arbiters use is that of the German philosopher Hegel.  It is not a linear system of dates and events; it is a logic which states that History marches forward dialectically, each era supplanted by the next. This transition is dynamic, i.e. the current structure is challenged by a new one and eventually supplants it but not before there is a synthesis of the two. It is premised on the role of conflict. Therefore, it sees man as inextricably forced to interact with or against societal norms. He gains his consciousness there and has no identity outside of it. Hegel formulated his system during the French Revolution which for him was consciousness realizing itself on an historical plane.

 The individual players were just acting out a huge cosmic plan. Individuality matters little except as it participates in or is transformed by the dialectic. History according to Hegel is a meat grinder, which shapes ordinary men into uniform hamburger patties that can be easily consumed by societal appetites.



 His most devastating insight into History’s trope gives me chills when I read it: ” What is rational is real, what is real is rational”. How does it feel to be caught in this vise: Nothing can be real for us unless it is reduced to thought so that rationality becomes the only reality. It pretty much paints the picture of the 20thc. 

Increasing rationalization of society by science interspersed with periodic paroxysm of horror at what has happened or delirious self- assertions of the self. The German Expressionist and the Abstract Expressionist shows side by side at MOMA represented those latter periods of individual revolt. 

Every revolution and its participants of the past two centuries have all justified their acts, violent or otherwise, by an appeal to a more rational order. The goal of Hegel’s world is pure consciousness where there is no distinction between self and world as self and object as both are subsumed in pure reason.

Johnson 1970's

In art, the evolution from representation to abstraction that was described by Clement Greenberg, a Hegelian, has the inevitability of the movement politically from monarchies to the modern state. Without this system of thinking there would be no mass culture, no zeitgeist or the repetition of generational selves that we are forced to identify with. It enframes how we dress, how we talk and how we paint.

The first inkling I got of the impact of this historical process in art oddly enough appeared to me in a late work of John Singer Sargent, exhibited at the MFA Boston some 16 years ago. It is a large mural of soldiers returning from WW 1 blinded by mustard gas, walking in a long line, the hand of the one behind on the soldier in front, the blind leading the blind. All 
are in uniform, somewhat tattered from battle, repeatable units without sight. 

"Gassed" John Singer Sargent

This is an uncanny image from the master of the exquisite moment, the painter of beautiful and egotistical upper class people of the Belle Époque surrounded by luxury and symbols of power; it is about blindness and uniformity. An artist, who had the ability and technique to represent anything placed in front of him, now shows an extraordinary courage in representing a new reality where the moment is deprived of nuance and subtlety, and the individual is reduced to a repetition of units where excessive observation is irrelevant. This is emblematic of the end of realism in a sense because the excessive sensory impact of bombs, shrapnel and mustard gas overwhelms any attempt by the senses to capture the world in a figurative fashion. 

Abstraction will be the lingua franca of 20th c art where all the rough edges of the real will be filed off ultimately dissolving the human presence all together. Greenberg inspired as he was by Hegel established a theory of the visual that made that movement from representation to abstraction inevitable. Much of the evolution had already taken place by the time he defined it, but it accelerated the process by creating a theory that gave artists who wanted to jump on the art train a goal of total reduction that could be easily predicted and imitated. It is Hegel’s art of pure rationality and it slowly dissolves the world of the bourgeoisie replacing it with uniform, blind monads that can be shaped into abstract patterns for war or commerce.  

In America of the ‘20s thru the ‘40s the realism of the Ashcan school and the Regionalists exist side by side with Abstraction but by the ‘50s Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism will have started a thirty year reign ending in the minimalism of the ‘70s and ‘80s. However, an ironic sort of realism appears in the form of Pop Art in the ‘60s and runs parallel to Abstraction. 

According to the literature about Lester Johnson, its ascension to power helped marginalize the figurative expressionism that he was identified with. The critical community had allowed him to ride on the coattails of Abstract Expressionism as a sort of variant that kept the action of the gesture but brought the figure back into the painting. 

Shifting the spot light away from Johnson to Pop art which, with its imitation of mechanical reproduction, put another nail in the coffin of any kind of representational art based on the individual either painting their real or psychological environment. It seemed there was no room for the deeply nuanced meditations of Lester on the relation of self and society.

 Pop art is in fact the perfect product of the rationalized society that Hegel said we were moving toward; millions of mass-produced items that could not exist without the industrial technology to produce them and a mass culture manipulated by the media to purchase them. It was the new representation of man and society. The artists who painted in that style were considered by the art historians to be incredibly clever and even cunning tricksters in figuring out that the individual with all his ambiguous relation to others and society was dead. The Self was now a strange meta-self that existed only in the media. Warhol in his shamanic way understood how the media would lift up the individual to realize this meta-self for his fifteen minutes of fame only to let him subsequently descend into obscurity. 

The media is our current equivalent of the pyramids, a collective project upon which millions slave to create and maintain. It is not for nothing that Warhol called his studio The Factory. The critics and artists who embraced this world view got to lord it over those artists with the epithet of Bourgeois, suffering  from a false consciousness. I recently saw a biopic of Camus where Sartre leveled that insult at Camus . That insult and the following were the mantras I heard repeated throughout my career: Death to painting, Death to the individual. The air got sucked out of Lester’s expressionist world very quickly.

Maybe the distance we now have from the art world of the ‘60s, will allow us to reappraise the importance of Johnson’s work . A student today would have to look hard to locate it in the literature which shines its light on those movements surrounding it but bypasses his figurative endeavor. Maybe the inevitability of art history can be reversed or redirected. The current show at the Acme Gallery in Boston provides a broad swathe of his work that has helped this artist, who studied with him at Yale, rethink his importance. 

His painting’s interface with the Abstract Expressionism out of which it grew and with Pop art, which supplanted it in the critical community, is complicated. First of all, he would be considered a second-generation abstract expressionist and secondly a figurative expressionist, so twice removed from the source. 

Both de Kooning and Pollock ended their careers painting centrifugal works that are Whitman-like in their expansive notion of the self. They resemble the sensibility of Romantic American landscape painters such as Bierstadt or Frederick Church and become quintessentially American. Lester is no romantic. He sees the human condition as fraught with ambiguity grounded in the active human presence and by extension the human community. It is not mankind or humanity in the abstract that he paints, but “Da-sein”, the Heideggerian term which puts man beyond his self-consciousness into the human community without giving primacy to either one or the other. 

Johnson’s early heads from the early to mid sixties ‘60s are emphatic in their message that we are here in this world not somewhere else. The implied effort of his stroke states that Lester Johnson is in a shared space with the head of the person he is representing. There is always a sense of decision in the splash of the paint on canvas. Man cannot avoid deciding for or against something.  His frequent use of the Classical Greek head seems to say that this idea of man has always been with us. It is trans-historical, anti-Hegelian. His work has that knotty difficult quality of a Beckett play, where despite all the gestures and acts nothing is resolved; Human existence is reduced to its essence in “Waiting for Godot”, where act upon act doesn’t seem to resolve their angst. In the end they are there, just there. 

Lester Johnson came of age in a generation that did not buy into ecstatic notions of pop culture. He did not lose himself in the social mood, like my generation does. He was not part of the generation that wanted to be “groovy” or “go with the flow” a generation that imprinted on mass media. They are the artists of the death of the individual, the exaltation of the corporate man. In that sense Pop also becomes the next quintessentially American art form. It is just a tip of the hat to those images crafted as artifacts created for mass culture. 

The complexity of the self is gone as artists like Warhol glory in the vacuum that has been created. Johnson’s work is a much more nuanced and sophisticated revelation of the individual vs. the group. With his series of paintings of people joined arm in arm from the late sixties he acknowledges that people join groups; they lock hands like the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall to act together as a crowd. Some recent writing on Heidegger makes the case that he did not use the term ”They” in a pejorative way. It was an inevitable aspect of da-sein, part of the human condition. 

Lester Johnson could be considered asking the same questions as a phenomenologist trying to describe the shape of what it means to be human. However, being part of the group is not an unquestioned given as it was for the pop artist. The line up of generic men in Johnson’s work is often scary. They are reminiscent of the living dead that pour out of the Underground in T.S Eliot’s London. They are unsmiling and unaware of the condition that defines their identity with the group, carried along by some mass hysteria. 

In his work of the Seventies and Eighties, the generation where the media co-opts every attempt of the individual to break the mold, the “They” in his work has changed its story. The light is brighter and sunnier. His characters are dressed each in different patterns of the period and although they are locked arm in arm like the bowler wearing men of the ‘50s they gaze out dreamily in different directions. Despite those slight gestures toward individuality they are still side by side. They are always plural not singular.

Lester Johnson places himself in the midst of the world Janus-like  looking at  the self and the group at once and asking so many questions: Who am I who is forced to decide and act? And who are “they” who act as a whole? Is there such a thing as “We”? And what is this hand that creates this image in a kind of existential act? Where do I end and the other start?

In one painting from the late sixties, he paints himself with a focus on his hand holding a brush in front of a painting of his men in the street asks the question” Who is this person, what is this hand who has created these characters.” Other self-portraits show a blunted hand as though the brush is tied to it reminiscent of the photograph of Renoir who had to tie a brush to his arthritic hand toward the end of his life in order to paint. The hand translates the world within to the canvas. Is he saying it is just an extension of the will and an instrument that is forced to blindly act, or is it too limited and clumsy to convey everything within? If you are capable of any subtlety in your thinking, these paintings will initiate it. They warrant multiple viewings and their graphic simplicity belies their complexity.

One drawing in the show at Acme that I took great pleasure in looking at was an ink brush drawing of a view through a window of the ocean in Provincetown from the fifties. The space depicted starting from a table and chairs in front of him, to the window frame, then the porch and finally the boats on the water are all rendered by the same black unmodulated stroke. The space is compressed and all the things are simply depicted.  My first thought on looking at it, was that this guy is visually astute. He can draw.

 I remember that he was the only faculty member at Yale to talk with me one on one about my thesis show. He said he admired the kind of space I had created in my still life’s, which were in fact very flattened out and very influenced by Matisse .He had understood the importance of space even within flatness and how without space Matisse would only have been a mere designer. I thought as well of how drawing is not offered in grad school at Yale anymore, at least according to a conversation Bernie Chaet had with the current Dean Robert Storr while Chaet was doing his portrait (interestingly enough a portrait with blue smudges instead of eyes). How do you abstract from the real in front of you; is it only an old fashioned exercise in epistemology? Is there any nature left to learn from as we spend most of our lives in front of the computer screen. Lester created so much light in that drawing by activating the page with his use of black. Such old fashioned concepts: space and light.

How do we work our way back to Johnson’s work and let it tell its story? Current art criticism and the art of the academy because it is under the thrall of Duchamp with the primacy of ideas over the optical, is highly critical of painting that carries a scent of representation, as though someone like Johnson’s work does not think; The art criticism of the past leaves him towered over by their mythological treatment of the Abstract Expressionists and Pop Art. 

I hope that what little I have written here lets us see that Lester Johnson’s work is a profound meditation on our being in the world, with all the ambiguities between self and society. A psychologist and a sociologist can use these terms to describe the structure of both but they can’t tell you how it feels to be a self among others and witness to the masses of people in the modern city who define themselves as a single self. What do all those definitions look like? The hand knows more than the conscious mind. Lester trusted it to reveal secrets about our world and self that the mind could only over-simplify. 

He knew that to paint/see with a brush at the end of your hand as an extension of the body and the mind allowed him to discover unconscious insights not explicit in our day-to-day existence. This discovery was an event in paint . To the contemporary artist who accepts that they are doomed or destined (sometimes I don’t know which verb applies) to express themselves in a language of painting that in kindergarten was the universal language by which every child described their world and became an expressive medium in the 20thc in the hands of Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and their American students, Gorky, deKooning and Pollock, they should find much to give them comfort and inspiration in viewing and studying Lester’s work.

Painting treads a path of cognition unique to the visual artist. It must break free of the burden of history and the predications of the priestly class of intellectuals who establish a priori what can or cannot be done in the world of art. That class has been enormously successful; there is currently one show in the  galleries world-wide, whether in Paris, Rome New York or Shanghai: Photo originated image on the wall, a found object on the floor and a title about the oppression of some group excluded from the Hegelian dialectic. An artist must proclaim like Lester: ”Here I stand.This is my experience and this is how it feels to be alive. ”


HANDROSE


You almost became 
“They”
Your rockettes
Arm in  Arm.

Or Eliot’s living dead
That flowed over London Bridge.

The Brooklyn
That Miller left for 
Paris and from a private paradise
Shaped the flower of  the 
70’s (1)

You stuck it out.
You knew that it all added up  to 
Nothing, anyway.
Sacrificed the
caress of private moments to 
monitor  the storm troopers
Marching to and from work.

One day in front of your stolid men
last weeks stump
Bloomed. Your tortured hand


(1)Miller’s  grim images of Brooklyn in  “The Tropic of Cancer” make me think of Johnson’s men. Miller escaped New York and created a private love nest with Anais Nin in Paris, out of which grew private notions of self-realization that were fodder for the delirious sex drugs and rock and roll culture in the California of the sixties and seventies. Mamet in a recent essay on American theatre sees Eliot and Pound as escapists and I am sure he would throw Miller into this category. Lester’s world is one of men who are compelled to act not knowing what the consequences are. Somewhat like a Mamet play, Johnson’s painting has a stolid determination about it.

William Bailey and Donald Judd

            I have written about almost all my teachers from college: Al Held on on my blog and "Artdeal", Lester Johnson on “Berkshire Fine Arts”, Bernie Chaet in an essay to a show I curated and Erwin Hauer in my book on drawing, but have neglected to write about the work of William Bailey. Odd since he had the most impact on my sense of what it means to be an artist. I still recall fondly his support of my work when he was my “Scholar of the House” advisor as a senior. Although I have quoted his insights throughout my blogging, his work presents itself to me as a conundrum and resists easy description. It is realist but does not partake of the history of realism from Caravaggio on, since it is not grounded in an exploration of the perceptual base of most realism. It therefore does not have the sort of optical impact of something freshly seen as in Lennart Anderson’s or Al Leslie’s work. It partakes of the figuration of the early Renaissance, that is typified by Perugino, which was still imbued with notions of metaphysics and correspondences between the earthly and the higher realms. where ideality dictated reality. There is a will to make the figures of his paintings real, but it is achieved through a meticulous working of the surface not through any analysis of how things are seen through the eye's optical structure. Like so much avant-garde American art of the last fifty years they jump out of the subject/object dichotomy and move into a neutral world of pragmatically made things following simple rules. There is neither a trope toward endless reduction in a search for underpinnings nor a move into the optical ambiguity of figure/ground that Held explores in his “Big N”. It is as though the object is already reduced in the way that cubes in a Judd installation are, not subject to further questioning as to what stands under them. Both Midwesterners they share a workmanlike practicality, which posits pragmatically things as made and space as just the opportunity for placement.

William Bailey

This interpretation flies in the face of  Bailey as a Romantic, who has turned his back on Modernity to flee into a world of numinous objects. He is closer to Malevich, the father of Minimalism, whose abstraction is created ex nihilo than to Mondrian, whose search for essences involved a painstaking reduction of the visual world. Although, I do recall his admiration for Mondrian’s surfaces, where the remnants of physicality still survived. Maybe it could be said about Bailey’s surfaces that they are the sole event in his work where the optical remains.

His followers have latched onto the myth of the anti-modern Bailey with his philo-Italian lifestyle and love of the pre-modern. When I knew him early on, his somewhat revisionist opinions did give me permission to look at whatever art period interested and inspired me without feeling compelled to follow the style du jour. But I now see Bailey as very modern, more modern than Held who presented himself as more cutting edge than everyone else at Yale. Bailey and Judd represent the rejection of the optical tradition of the West from Caravaggio's chiaroscuro to Cubism, a rejection that has defined the last 40 years of art more than any other idea. Culturally, it puts him in the anti-representational domain of Samuel Beckett whose characters in “Endgame” are reduced to a bare minimum and resist further reduction. The perspectival approach in the end always atomizes and relativizes what it sees: Bailey, Beckett and Judd put a stop to this endless dissolution with a harsh notion of a pragmatic reality beyond which one cannot go.

Bailey is Judd and Judd is Bailey 

Donald Judd

Judd presents the irreducibility of the human/made with his boxes.  Bailey is doing the same with his eggs, bottles and figures. Bailey’s message is that the world of the human is self-constructed, yet once constructed it envelopes us; we surround and are surrounded by the human. We are always arranging our objects on the table or putting them away in the cupboard. Inevitably, the human presence stands out there beyond us without the ambiguity of being subjected to our gaze as in Giacometti. It is an eternal realm that will outlive the abstract constructs of engineering and science. In the end Bailey’s is a rhetorical painting, which insists adamantly on an idealized notion of being in the world.

 

Donald Judd

Although putting him in the Minimalist camp probably creates some confusion in the reader’s mind when you consider the multiple objects and “realism” of his work(Judd didn't like the term as it applied to him), I think the confusion is obviated if you see Judd et alia as the “Irreducibles”. Then, Bailey fits right in with this notion of the artist’s vision that puts a stop to endless analysis. Notions of autonomy and authority of High Modernism have come up recently via comments by Carl Belz on my writing about Provisional Painting and Zombie Formalism. Intentionally or otherwise, the practitioners of  Provisionalism (often called Casualism)deconstruct the authoritative stance of artists like Stella, Judd or Kelly by abandoning Minimalism’s self -referential  autonomy. In a post-modern way everything is couched in irony and incompleteness. Their approach is seen as the necessary abandonment of the self-sufficient world of scientific certainty. Bailey is clearly on the other side of the divide. There is neither irony nor incompleteness. He is an autonomous modernist side by side with Stella, Kelley and Judd.

Just stumbled across this reply to my Lester Johnson piece on Berkshire Fine Arts by the poet Rosanna Warren. Google every gallery on earth and you will find 99% are exhibiting "one show": a found object(ersatz sculpture ) on the floor, photo-document on the wall and a pseudo-profound statement about some group in need of uplift into the Hegelian dialectic.Global group think!!

Figurative Expressionist:Lester Johnson -->

Dear Martin,

What an extraordinary piece. I wish I could have seen the Johnson

show; I'm living in New York this year, on leave, writing.

You put your finger precisely on the problem: the coercive Hegelianism

of Greenberg's vision, and the intolerance it institutionalized. Great

image too, about the media world of Pop (and post-Pop, conceptual art)

as a vast  pyramid built by an army of slaves (us!). It's refreshing

to have you articulate so strongly and lucidly the fact of mass

dehumanization in which our culture of mass advertising and

consumerism collaborates. And to set Johnson's art as a

counter-phenomenon, of highly intelligent (not romantic) response and

analysis.

I never studied with LJ, but have admired his work over the years, and

am sorry to miss this show. Good for Acme-

Warmly,

Rosanna