Mondrian and Monet flowers in Paris and Notre Dame as Rhizome

My book on Drawing and Painting languishes in virtuality, somewhere on the servers at KDP, although occasionally on my dashboard I see someone scratches at the file to bring it in to actuality but then after a page or two lets it lapse into the mostly unread. Is the unread like the undead when it reverts back to the virtual? Not quite fully alive? I notice that spell check won't let me consider the spelling of virtuality as valid; so I look it up and find it has a rather esoteric philosophic meaning making its way from Duns Scotus to Charles Sanders Pierce, Bergson, Proust and Deleuze, though not in direct order of descent. It seems it has uses in many domains of intellectual pursuit: Virtual Image in Science, Virtual World in Technology, Virtue in etymology and the Possible in Ontology. The most intriguing is the actuality of the Eucharist as truly embodying the blood and body of Christ: (actual vs virtual), which was held as untrue by the Sacramentarians and supported by Luther.

What I can gather from this divagation is that information needs red-blooded humans to make it truly come alive. Like a revolution needs people in the street willing to spill blood to fulfill the words of its goals.

Seeing an art show in a gallery does fit the bill of live human contact activating art. The reality of the white cube, so close to that of a church with believers, will never die (I hope). 

Mondrian

In Paris I saw a show at the Musee Marmottan Monet of the early work of Mondrian that changed my opinion about Piet. If you put his work into the context of those whom he influenced especially post WW11 American artists he comes across as the progenitor of an arid intellectualization of art. Early Stella for example is an hard-nosed Yankee interpretation of Mondrian. If you see the abstraction in the context of his early work, his painting becomes more tentative and probing. The overall mood of many of his landscapes is reminiscent of the  Hudson River School’s use of luminism to evoke the transcendental. Even as he begins to coax an underlying linear visual structure out of these landscapes the moody light of dawn or dusk remains.

Mondrian

Throughout his career he drew flowers belying my understanding that they were limited to the pre-abstraction stage of his career. The petals are soft and pliable and verge in their organicism on the infinite. On the one hand they could be seen as the antidote to his abstraction, on the other hand the abstraction has a lot of that pliability, a gentle push and pull off of the flat surface of the canvas.  Notions of tenderness and delicacy come to the fore.

Mondrian

This reconsideration of the geist of his work helped me reconsider the work of the late Monet on permanent display downstairs from Mondrian. My first response is that he is a better abstract painter than his imitator Guston. And like Mondrian was moved by the organic growth of flowers, although his flowers are more explosive like Dylan Thomas’s green fuse.

Monet

So the role of the flower seems formative in abstraction. At least in Europe.

The plug has been pulled on Notre Dame’s magic. I heard from my sister who spoke with someone involved in funding the repairs that the scaffolding put up for the renovation pre-fire is so completely welded to the stonework that there is a risk of collapse of the building if they are separated. The notion of hierarchy and the blending of heaven and earth embodied in the building have been severed. I am sure anti-hierarchical Bataille would have loved this and Deleuze would encourage leaving it as is or turn it into a structural rhizome as part of the infrastructure of the urban sprawl.

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This interview with Miles Hall a former student from my years in Boston covers a lot of territory

https://www.lucidrva.com/martin-mugar-conversation

my still life from early 80's next to a Steiner blackboard drawing.(Miles Hall made the connection)

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

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.

Zombie Formalism:the lingering life of abstraction in New York that just wont die

Durer using grid to draw

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”.”

Wade Guyton

It is interesting to unpack this in relation to the transition to abstraction at the beginning  of the last century, and in particular a rather recent recycle of minimalism that is cropping up in New York galleries and has received an imprimatur by the Whitney with a mid-career show of Wade Guyton, one of its practitioners. It provides an insight into the endless politics of suspicion that permeate so much of Western Culture over the last century and in particular painting. The ambition for the thinkers quoted above is to liberate our consciousness from a subjectively based consciousness that for various reasons is beholden to visuality. The first manifestation of this subjectivity or the “mental eye” was first seen in the realism that commenced in the Renaissance with the use of perspective and then in the Baroque with chiaroscuro. It reigned confidently over painting until the end of the 19^th century. This mental eye was built out of clear notion of a strong subject, that shaped via a scientific understanding of perceptual processes, the world that surrounded the artist. The imposition of the gaze of the individual on what surrounded him seemed to parallel the thymotic excesses of Western Civilization as it objectified via science and capitalism the whole world. The image of the conquistador Aguirre in Herzog’s classic film “Aguirre, the Anger of God” descending the Amazon and conquering solely with his imperious gaze all that he surveyed is probably the most emblematic image for me of this attitude. A rather powerful bit of information to support this notion of Western consciousness is that the perspectival system of the Versailles gardens radiated from the bed of Louis the XIV.  Sartre has a lot to say about the withering gaze of his grandfather, who was an old world authoritarian type. The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 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.

Grotjahn

Zabala goes on to say: “If the old philosophy only referred to what could be seen clearly, the new philosophy refers only to what can be clearly communicated.” Rorty and others call this transformation: the “Linguistic Turn”.  Science required that objects be placed under the scrutiny of the researcher and submit to the scientific method.  A strange amalgam of suspicion and arrogance worked together in a mighty cabal to turn the world inside out. A naive acceptance of the world as it is presented on a day-to-day basis was replaced by a vision that the world must be founded on a more solid basis through the power of logos. The world became transformed into a series of topics: geology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, grammatology etc.

The first crack in that stranglehold on the real appeared in the phenomenological studies of Husserl and Heidegger. Heidegger has a phrase that always carried a lot of significance for me: “always already”. If we act on the world in a certain way, we are always already in it as a participant with other people using a language that we did not create. The pure cogito was immediately problematized. Our relation to things is not one of subject to object, but a more shared engaged reality of being in the world. His word for that reality was “Dasein”, which roughly translates as “being there.”

This became the start of a hundred years of philosophers trying to decenter the scientific gaze by deconstructing the language of metaphysics, with each new generation of philosophers accusing the previous one of still being subject to it. Wittgenstein added to this deconstruction by moving our focus away from the metaphysical to an analysis of how we use language in the real world. During the most recent era of French Deconstruction one adjective that you didn’t want attached to your ideas was “logo-centric”. Initially, the problem was that behind the strong ego was the belief in God as the origin of everything in a well-ordered universe, which still supported Descartes rationality. After that everything logical was perceived to be just a trace of that divine belief system, which had to be expunged from wherever in our language it was still hiding. And of course it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.

Sarah Morris

I got off on this tangent after reading John Yau write in“HyperAllergic” about what he called the latest “look” in Abstraction. The work of its practitioners, Morris, Guyton and Kassay looks very much like the Abstraction of Stella, Reinhardt and Kelly, which is decidedly logo-centric. Greenbergian ideas about reducing forms to basic elements and constructing abstract realities went hand and hand with the positivists who believed in the superiority of mathematical language over the language of poets and mystics. “What you see is what you get” Stella is purported to have said. The early spirituality of Rothko and Mondrian is gone. These artists are laconic macho painters. They give you the least amount of what might be construed to be a painting and then pull up the ladder behind them. I suspect that this paring down of painting to simple terms embodies in some manner the analytic analysis of language, which reduces language to its grammatical elements and then submits it to validity tests. They want to see how painting functions as shapes on a wall. Or as they loved to say in grad school: does it work.

Already Yau, who is not a fan of these artists, does accept the premise that we should not go back to the days of the gigantomachia of Gorky and de Kooning. And there may be some truth that this generation of artists is too imbued with the culture of deconstruction to attempt to overcome Kelley, Stella and Reinhardt or in the case of Kassay, Ryman, at least on their own terms. Something else is going on here: There seems to be a need to push painting toward something totally inert, that could be simply part of a common language, no longer power-laden as the last word of something irreducible, which was the goal of Kelly, Reinhardt and the early Stella. The work of these artists becomes as common as money, just a token of exchange, like baseball cards. By shifting the terms of painting away from any lingering notion of being an object and pushing it into the realm of language and in the case of Guyton producing the painting mechanically with an inkjet printer, sets the painting free from its roots in science and objectification.

Jacob Kassay

If the influence of Tugendhat and analytic philosophy is as pervasive as I think it is, the primacy of language theory would give permission to this generation to take painting further down the road to just words and sentences. Rorty who had his role in this winding down of the metaphysical, critiques Heidegger because “he treats language as a brooding presence rather than as a string of marks and noise emitted by organisms and used by them to coordinate their behavior.”

Heidegger placed importance on the ignored copula “is” that we use without acknowledging its role in grounding our day-to-day use of language in something more numinous. It backgrounds it and in poetry approaches the foreground. In the case of our contemporary practitioners of abstraction it has been excised.

These works of art look like paintings, act like painting but on closer inspection are as bloodless and lifeless as zombies. That the New York culture allows this kind of painting to rise to the top is no surprise: the New York financial world is known for creating zombie loans and the NY Fed has succeeded in creating a zombie economy.

Simone Weil said that culture moves in grand arcs either ascending  or descending. Assuming the movement is down, could it be we have reached the bottom?

I can be followed on twitter @mugar49

References to this article on line and in hard copy:

Raphael Rubinstein references my role in coining the notion of Zombie Formalism in paragraph 19 in this article in "Art in America", another reference to the sequence of events here: About:Content, Another reference:capscripts, and  at Paint This Desert and most recently on Hyperallergic

Question appeared on Jeopardy! noticed by Jerry Saltz who helped propagate the notion of Zombie Formalism
although he still claims that Robinson coined it.

Miklos Legrady at critic at New Art Examiner Chicago

Link to by my book on Amazon

Notice the correlation of Zombie art to Zombie Economy

nice interview on my ideas on ZF by Miles Hall

reference to my coining of ZF on page 7 in presentation by Marisa Lerer and Conor McGarrigle Art in the Age of Financial Crisis