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

According to Amazon the book is for sale

link to book on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364
Project #4:

Studies of both still life and indoor/outdoor repeated with Ink and Brush 

 After doing several sessions using charcoal, this project also could be repeated with black ink. The proportion of the white to black is a variable that the student can play with. The white takes on more power as it becomes increasingly isolated. There are other qualities that can be exploited with black and white as well. There is the Rorschach effect where the shapes become evocative apart from their role in the purely visual black-white dynamic.

 Most of what I teach arises from a self-reflective process of a stable viewer looking at the same set of objects in a controlled visual event over time. This allows the student to get in touch with the stabilizing structures of the visual event as it is created within the eye. However, once the student liberates these shapes, they are free to be manipulated by the unconscious so that black shapes can take on unexpected meanings. Also and probably more importantly is the introduction to the shape making ability of the eye. The eye tends to interpret things as shapes if they are of uniform value. You can imagine a person moving toward you: at a distance they may be just a dark value against a lighter surrounding. As they approach the viewer, details are more prominent and the person may even be recognized. 

                                                     

Matisse Dahlias and Pomegranates

Matisse Interior with window and palm trees

The tension between figure and ground and its deconstruction can be explored in this exercise. In our day-to-day life, all that we need to focus on are the things at hand. They are always seen against a ground but the ground drops away and only serves as a backdrop. In the indoor/outdoor work of Matisse and Bonnard that I referred to above, the outdoor view is seen simultaneously with the background and engages in a sort of flip flop where neither one assumes any dominance. This ambiguity can release a good deal of visual energy. It in- forms the paintings of Al Held; in particular, the famous “Big N” at the MoMA, which is, in fact, a big N created out of two small triangular shapes at the bottom and top of the canvas. The eye cannot see both interpretations simultaneously and flip flops back and forth between the N and the triangles. These are issues that come to the surface, as it were, when you work with black and white abstract shapes. The student stumbles into these issues which, if they were treated as technical exercises, would not have a lasting impact on the student. 

Student Drawing from NHTI Concord,NH

Project #5: Cutting out black and white shapes from black and white drawings. 

After the study is done, an exercise that can be fun and revelatory of the eye’s cognitive strength is to use a mat cutter to cut out the black and white shapes and then using the cut-outs to rebuild the drawing. Not only are these cut-out abstract but the eye tends to interpret simple shapes as recognizable things. With this exercise, the student is also participating in the transition that Matisse made from observational drawing to his cut- outs. We do not literally see patterns in our day-to-day experience. Just like lines that we discussed above, they are structures that allow us to see but are not seen. (As I have said elsewhere in the book, drawing makes explicit hidden visual structures.) 

Sarah Griswold at NHTI(cut out ink wash still life drawing)looks like a person riding a dragon

To see patterns, you often have to screw up your eyes or do what I have suggested in the last exercise: push the student into an extreme visual situation of indoor/outdoor. If it took Matisse decades to move from the chiaroscuro of the Salon School to the abstraction of the cutouts, then it makes sense that the student should be led through a recapitulation of the process to experience the deeper visual that makes Matisse's cut-outs work.

Matisse cut out

Often this project is taught as a design exercise without understanding the origins of abstraction. The student’s understanding will be stretched like a rubber band only to revert back to its original shape after the exercise. The ability to recognize shapes as objects without detail also reminds the student of some higher cognitive functions that con- nect us with the real world of things. The “Big N” functions ambiguously as it moves back and forth between abstraction and letter recognition. The deconstructive process that takes you back to raw material of perception i.e. value, can in turn move back to a literal description of things in our world. 

 From “Seeing” by John Frisby. The abstract shapes add up to a knight on horseback. By permission of Oxford University Press, 1990 

 The Big “N” by Al Held (1964) 93/8 x 9 Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY © 2018 Al Held Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by ARS, New York NY

Authors painting 1995(is it two separate entities glowering at each  other or  one shape split in two?)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364

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

                                         

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

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

2022 oil and wax on canvas #101

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

2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yellow Submarines"(private collection Germany,1994)

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

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

"The Arrow" 1995

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

"Footprints" Late 90's

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

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

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

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

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

Ekstasis of Repetition.2013

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

#99 2021

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

I can be followed on twitter @mugar49

Link to my book on Amazon