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

Donald Shambroom's"Duchamp's Last Day" and some musings on art and technology

Donald Shambroom has added to the long list of exotica on Duchamp with the publication of “Duchamp’s Last Day” by the David Zwirner Gallery. Exotic in that everything about Duchamp is strange at first although the more one understands his oeuvre the more one realizes his notion of the visual image would be exoteric to its unfolding in the 20^th and the 21^st century. With Marcel we are always playing catch-up. He is central to understanding the shift of the image from the individual-made to the proliferation of machine-made imagery. Not that anything he created bespoke of the assembly line as did the silkscreens of his follower Andy Warhol. The “Large Glass” remains gnarly and difficult in its homemade construction, oddly metamorphic in its subsequent history and prescient in its anticipation of the glass TV screen as the platform for mass-produced imagery. Nietzsche’s death of God quickly translates into the death of man but we would be better served to think that Duchampia presages not the death of man but just presents another concoction of man, a man whose boundaries are physically dissolved so as to function more as an object among objects in mass culture. Another epithet of Nietzsche comes to mind: ”There was one Christ and he died on the cross.”  You can see Duchamp’s destruction of the flat reflecting image all over Rauschenberg but Duchamp himself left traditional painting far behind. He makes it nigh impossible to go back to the image reflected off the flat canvas, unless like the Zombie Formalists you drain it of any residual power.

The large glass

The book describes the movements of the characters, who were present before and after Duchamp’s death. Crucial to Shambroom’s telling of the story is Duchamp’s visit earlier in the day to a bookstore to buy a book that came with 3D glasses to create Geometric anaglyphs. He had used it in the past as it allowed him to playfully dally at what he thought to be the edge of the 3D and the unimaginable fourth dimension. Shambroom cites Gertrude Stein’s statement that Duchamp was a young man who “talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.”  This strangeness will be featured at the end of the book in a playful Duchampian act of the imagination by Shambroom, which I will not relate so as not to spoil a very fanciful summation to the story.

In the interim after Duchamp’s purchase of the “Geometric Anaglyphs” we find him in conversation with the poet Georges Herbiet whose wife has recently passed away. In the evening he dines at his apartment with his close friends Man Ray, Robert Lebel, who had published the first monograph on Duchamp and their respective wives.  The topic of death keeps cropping up. The transition from life to death seems to haunt him. a phrase keeps recurring, which would become the epitaph on his tombstone: “Besides, it is always the others who die.” In other words very simply we witness the death of others but not our own.  At one point while walking Lebel outside to his car after dinner, Man Ray slipped and fell. He blurted out:” You’d thought I dropped dead.” Another premonition.

Duchamp and Man Ray taken by Cartier-Bresson

After all the guests had gone, at one in the morning, Teeny, Duchamp’s wife, found him collapsed and moribund in the bathroom. As though Man Ray was ready for this eventuality, when informed of the death, he returned camera in hand to take a deathbed photo. This photo was only made known to the public in 2011, suggesting some sort of intentional act on the part of the Duchamp estate to withhold it from the public realm. This delay provided Shambroom with ample opportunity to discuss notions of the artist deciding what is art and what isn’t and in this case something controlled conceivably from the grave. Its reproduction in the book is apparently its first appearance in the public realm.

At the very end of the story some very intriguing words are cited apropos Duchamp that were written by the artist collective: Lu Cafausu:

“Perhaps art demands that one play with death. Perhaps it introduces a game, a bit of play in the situation that no longer allows for tactics or mastery.”

“To die well is to die in one’s own life, turned towards one’s own life and away from death…the good death shows more consideration for the world than regard for the depth of the abyss.”

These words express the sine qua non of Duchamps's work that looks away from  mastery, fear and trembling before the abyss that underlie so much of Western and Eastern art for that matter. It brought to mind an essay I wrote on the sculptor Billy Lee whose early work embodied that sort of seriousness, that I always found appealing. Sculpted out of granite and shaped like the helmets of hoplites, it conveyed a notion of power and conflict embedded in the very substance of life. His new work done in China has jumped out of conflict and is all about play and fabricated in glossy material that is produced in Chinese factories.  It is also done to be part of the urban fabric not an aestheticized sculpture garden. In its use of industrial car finish it is reminiscent of the work of Anish Kapoor. In one instance of playfulness it makes fun of the imagery of his early work. It got me thinking about the energy that can be liberated when you break the barriers of art and technology and the global media.

Billy Lee Sculpture

The media of mass culture lifts the individual out of its locality and lets she/he vibrate in a global holism, especially now as globalism has reached its apogee and maybe subcomeing to populism. Duchamp made that merger allowable in his destruction of the flat canvas. It has since split the art world irreparably into several camps: Those who still believe in the canvas and the power of its language to affect the viewer, those who want to use that language but as something absent of any power like the Zombie Formalists, those who still try to deconstruct it in the ongoing tradition of Duchamp and finally those who take advantage of the split to merge art and technology.

Billy Lee Sculpture in the urban landscape

Don Shambroom has achieved the latter merger in his new work, taking his paintings online to merge with moving images and sound. He does not cool down the story with irony but heats it up with a kind of global and even cosmic power. If Duchamp according to Lu Cafausu turns toward his own life  and away from death Shambroom turns his work toward the depth of the abyss. His creations start out from his paintings and are augmented with news imagery and sound to take their place on the global scene.

Painting by Shambroom that leads into video manipulation

Lorraine Shemesh and the impossibility of the Romantic

Where we are currently in the cultural history of ideas is hard to pin down. Ex post facto is always easier. The past has already been packaged and defined by countless historians but the present as it evolves into the future is hard to fix and if we try to paste the past on the present we get into a lot of trouble. It seems to work momentarily like assuming Trump is Hitler or the removal of a statue of Columbus from a college campus is akin to the destruction of a Buddhist statue by the Taliban. But is the past really so well categorized and no longer open for discussion. This struck me when I wrote about a visit I made to Edwin Dickinson on Cape Cod in 1970. After I had seen his work at the Biennale in Venice in 1968, I found myself encouraged by his love of the observed world to persevere in my pursuit of realism in the context of the overwhelming dominance of High Modernism in mid-century America. However, in my more recent analysis of his work I noticed that his phenotype was more 19^th century than 20thc and from the perspective of where we stand now seemed to float further and further into the past like some flotsam and jetsam thrown into the wake of a steamship until it is irretrievable and disappears out of sight. And I would add that if such a person were to live in our day and age he or she would be so out of  sync with the prevailing zeitgeist they would most likely go insane.

Dickinson

The most salient characteristic of Dickinson is artist as observer. Not an observer who looks coldly at the world but one who seeks to be at one with what he sees. He takes an anti-solipsistic stance where like Stevens in his great poem “Idea of order at Key West” Dickinson interweaves the self and nature. And most importantly Dickinson’s persona yearns for a meaning to one’s life on earth, a romantic ache for for a meaningful story on the world's stage.  It has a strong narrative bent where he is an actor in his own play. Not Beckett but Shakespeare with a beginning, middle and denouement. I have talked elsewhere of the deconstruction of the strong self at the hands of the deconstructionists or the supremacy of things a la Duchamp or the cosmic melding of self and society from Hegel where we are always mediated by being part of society. This is where we are currently in our world of art, a place where in in an essay on Jed Perl’s criticism I expressed the idea that we have been turning around in circles for quite some time. At the end of history there are no more mysterious unknowns ahead of us to conquer. We are surrounded by all the detritus of society that is circling around an immense black hole. As it circles around we are totally unaware that is slowly sinking into the abyss.

Recently, I sent out images of my new work to several names on my email list.  A few thoughtful replies came back acknowledging that the color of the new work was richer and more evocative. An unexpected reply came from Lorraine Shemesh whom I met , when we both studied at the BU Summer program in Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1969. Phillip Pearlstein was the artist in residence and several well-known New Realists came to visit most notably Al Leslie. There was a lot written about the New Realists in the art press at the time, which peaked with a cover story in Newsweek in 1970 featuring a painting by Bill Bailey on the cover. Two years later he would be my senior project advisor at Yale. Another fellow student at Tanglewood, Paul Dinger arranged a visit to Leslie’s studio in NYC after the program ended for an article in the art magazine “Boston Review of the Arts”,  that he had recently founded. Probably for the only time in my life I felt as an artist part of a movement.

Shemesh

Shemesh shows at the Allan Stone gallery in New York. Judging from the images in the two catalogs she sent me, she is clearly well trained in the tradition of classical painting as it was taught at BU where she got her BFA in 1971. The first catalog is a retrospective of her work, which culminates around 2009 with her iconic pool paintings that have evolved from swimmers at the surface or just below to a view of their now faceless bodies and body parts totally submerged. Whereas the earlier painting retained the notion of an observation of swimmers in a recognizable setting, the latest work puts the observer in with the observed. She does not rely on a romantic search for connections between herself and the environment that allows Dickinson to overcome his solipsistic isolation but conveys rather the inability to jettison the self in such a liquid realm. Of course to swim casually in a non-competitive manner implies the desire of the swimmer to enjoy being buoyed up by a warm and caressing world similar to the amniotic fluid that supports a fetus.  Shemesh retains a strange, almost awkward, disconnect between the possibility of a merger between the water and the physical hardness of the body that resists it. There is built into her work the impossibility of the kind of cosmic explosion of the self of a Pollack or the a priori connection one finds in Dickinson or for that matter the poems of Walt Whitman.  I think that this is inherited from her realist background but also from the edgy postmodernist zeitgeist of the New York scene. I find myself using the word impossible again as I did in the essay on the play at BAM on Thomas Merton that stated unambiguously  the impossibility of transcendence in a world awash in physical drives and passions. Or the word incommensurable to express the distance of paint and meaning when I wrote about a show I had with Paul Pollaro at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston. 

Shemesh