Jed Perl's review of the Koons Retrospective in "The New York Review of Books"

Jed Perl continues his quixotic tilting at wind mills in his latest review of the Koons phenomenon.That something must be said to deflate this conflation of art and global finance goes without saying.There is a slightly queasy sensation when we behold  the commercial event surrounding the work but also the work itself, an emotion that the early critics felt spoke to Koons being an artist that they had yet to come to terms with.The notion of the avant-garde that keeps pulling the rug out from under the complacent Bourgeoisie is the paradigm they use to justify his historical significance.Weren't the French academicians appalled by Cezanne and Van Gogh; the New York press by the Armory show?

Anxious to be on the right side of history the apologists go to no end to convince us that Koons is the latest turn in the on-going dialectic toward perfect self-consciousness, bringing us closer to our inner essence, which they stupidly imagine to be a love of kitsch. If you look at the work dialectically it does not in any way serve as a heightening of self-consciousness that counters any synthesis as did the work of Cezanne, for example, but rather represents a collapse of any tension between the individual and society. In my review of a show at the MFA in Boston, that placed the work of the Impressionists side by side with the work of the Academy, I demonstrated that  artists like Monet were more in touch with the scientific tradition of optics that had informed the work of someone like Chardin, than the academicians who painted in a fatigued version of chiaroscuro and were unable to take the next step toward color perception in painting. If you assume that the essence of the Impressionists and for that matter Matisse was to paint crudely and assume that any time you witness that crudeness in art it is a sure sign that the artist is the next Matisse, you are putting the cart before the horse and in fact create a perverse paradigm that only bad taste can assure that an artist's work is of enduring value. Monet was studying color theory, bringing painting back to the perceptual roots of the Renaissance and the Baroque and Van Gogh was searching in the tradition of the Christian saints for a way to overcome not just the spiritual smugness of his time but to make his life more meaningful. They were both reactionaries,i.e. backward looking, in their attempts to move painting forward. They were more self-conscious than their contemporaries and more aware of the the traditions that shaped European painting.

Look at Cabanel and Bouguereau if you want to see  precedents of Koons. They too leave you with a queasy feeling in your stomach. Unctuous, syrupy, cloying. In some sort of intellectual legerdemain, the contemporary critics imagine Koons to be cutting edge but as Perl says there is no way he can be put in the same category as the ascetic Duchamp, whose leap out of the visual still remains hard to process today. He is rather the protege of Warhol who saw the individual as merged into the commercial.That abandonment of the self into the commercial is the goal of all the rich businesspeople who buy Koons' work. They make their billions by seeing the masses as Play-Doh, just material to exploit. If we are as emotionally devoid of seriousness as Koons proclaims, we are ripe to enter a strange sort of paradise of the end times where we surround ourselves with kitschy possessions and kitschy emotions and dissolve our lives into some sort of colorful puddle. Are we at the end of history where Hegel's Absolute is the media and the tension between the heft of the individual and the media is erased.

.Just as the academicians were a symptom of the decadent Bourgeoisie of the 19thc, whose pseudo- classical vision of mankind had no relation to the facticity of the lives of real people so Koons is the wet dream of the class of global kleptocrats who envision the masses  acquiescing absolutely to their drive to sell us more and more things. I agree with Perl that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and quote Shakespeare's  quintessential paragon of self-consciousness:Hamlet:

"Oh God I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space-were it not that I  have bad dreams."

(In my article on the topos of modern culture I place Koons in the context of Western Nihilism)

I can be followed on twitter @mugar49

I published this on my blog awhile ago.Charles Giuliano thought this was a good sequel to his critique of MFA programs today

"Impressions of France",1995 Museum of Fine Arts,Boston
It was picked up by Karen Wright at "Modern Painter" for an issue on Cezanne and was considered
"thought provoking" but ultimately was not published.

Elodie LaVillette,(1842-1917)

Paul Cezanne(1839-1906)

Chuck Close passes away at 81(originally written in 2005 and republished in 2011)

CLOSE

Part of the urban legend surrounding Chuck Close is the rationale he gave for his stylistic move to figuration upon his arrival in NYC from Yale: Since everyone in New York was doing abstraction he thought it would be a good career move to paint realistically. Whether he said this or not the fact remains that he became identified with the resurgence of figuration in the late sixties with his oversized, in your face portraits and benefited from a good deal of the interest focused by critics on “Realism” at that time. In sum a good career move. The writing about figuration was as strong as that about the avant-garde and it was successful in establishing figuration as a viable movement in the eyes of the public. It was seen as an art that could address all the issues that abstraction didn’t: the particular, the moment, and empathy for the human presence. Writers and advocates like Linda Nochlin cast the roles of abstraction and realism in a kind of Platonic/Aristotelian split with abstraction being the art of concepts and realism the art of the unmanageable particular that can't be fit into the concept.

Much of the figurative movement drew its inspiration and source material from photography, which would provide the kind of detail of either light or texture that the artist could use to create specificity. Close followed in the mode known as Photo-Realism and applied a grid to transfer without distortion the photographic image to the canvas. The affect of his photo-generated work was ultimately cool and the use of the grid distanciating and although one might try to attribute empathy to Close’s decision to depict the human face it seemed that there was nothing there to be empathetic about no matter how close one looked. So close but so far.

What took Close beyond the figurative movement was his interest in pixilation. Probably generated by the realization that as you look closer beyond the detail of the texture of each hair follicle you enter into the world of visual cognition beyond detail where the image of the face is in fact a myriad of impulses created out of the rods and cones of the eye. It is a strange reversal that as we try to pin the “real” down by moving into the more particular details the less real the image becomes. Take a photograph that seems seamless and increase the magnification on a copier and then take each subsequent image and magnify it again and again. You end up with dots that no longer ad up to the image in which they have their origin.  Instead of getting closer to the subject you are thrown solipsistically back into the creator’s head.

The ability to recognize faces is considered by cognitive scientists to be a higher cognitive event; the recognition of patterns of dots is lower on the cognitive scale. The lower order impulses allow us to see color and contrast, the higher ones shape the color and pattern into a recognizable whole. In fact there is a part of the brain that is dedicated to facial recognition, which is obviously a necessary ability from an evolutionary point of view in order to distinguish friend and family from enemy or stranger.

The inquiry of the Impressionists into the raw material of perception was disconcerting to the average art viewers of the Nineteenth century since it dissolved the higher cognitive faculties of recognition. It didn’t add up and took a detour away from the traditional painting technique of the Baroque, which started from the general and ended in the particular. The impressionist marks freed from any goal lend themselves to new configurations and in the case of Cezanne begin to express a world shaped by gravity as a visual field, and with the Expressionists a world shaped by the emotions. Historically it is easy to trace the evolution of this liberated mark from Impressionism to Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and its apotheosis or possible dead-end in the pure abstract panels of Ellsworth Kelly.

In comparison to this dynamic deconstructive process Close is very reactionary. The pre-impressionist goal of realism remains dominant.  Moreover, he has us look at the image head-on which has been the mode of portraiture from time immemorial. But this does not stop certain critics from seeing him as avant-garde. His dispassionate use of the grid and the mechanical precision and the removal of the hand in the act of painting put him in the camp of those who claim the death of the author. The serial repetition of head after head puts him in league with Warhol: the preplanning in the camp of Sol Lewitt. The more recent work sets him up to be a proponent of chaos theory. Mark C Taylor in his “Moment of Complexity, Emerging Network Culture” sees the pixels as “fore grounded” in respect to the face and compares their interactive dynamic, as moving toward a tipping point between order and chaos. He sees his work as akin to the architectural drawings of Gehry with their “dynamic interactive processes”. So Close categorized in every avant garde movement of the last 30 years is now the avatar of network culture. I see more of a connection between Gehry and the strange space of Cézanne's late landscapes than with Close. There exists of course an ambiguity in Close’s work since each pixel has taken on a new identity filled with swirling images of varying color but the tyranny of the face survives easily this attempt to give weight to each pixel Moreover, the grid keeps his work from being dynamic as Taylor claims, ultimately stultifying Close’s work, even when he places it diagonally; the individual pixels could ideally fight more aggressively the cognitive event of the face as in cubism. In light of those earlier radical attempts of Cezanne and the Cubists to move art beyond figuration, Close’s claim to fame is suspect. The only answer is that there is no one else out there in the contemporary scene that reflects back on perception as the base of the world we see. This aspect has not gone unnoticed.  He picks up fans in the scientific community such as Mary Livingstone, a neurobiologist at Harvard who sees Close’s work embodying the visual process itself, which starts in local processes and moves on to global processes (read from local value and color contrast to face recognition), cutting out a space where the viewer can move back and forth between the two.

According to certain polling data Close along with Warhol are the artists the most easily recognizable by the public. Is it in part because they use the photographic image, the lingua franca of the masses? Despite all the manipulations Close applies to the photograph, he remains a photo-realist. I think the general public found in him what they need: raw data that can be observed as unprocessed to challenge their naïveté, but the photorealism lurking not far behind to pick them up lest they suffer vertigo. The more cerebral of the critics force his images to support their own agenda but they cant be totally faulted for this since the potential for a truly subversive disruption of the visual field is there in the work of Close albeit weighted down by the grid and the dominance of facial recognition. More than anyone else painting today Close understood the dead end of abstraction as it was being done by the minimalists and sought to reground himself in its origins in the Impressionist’s conceptual breakthrough.  Maybe we should leave his work there as a kind of hermeneutic movement back that doesn’t quite come full circle to define the future.

Martin Mugar, 12/05

Copyright: Martin Mugar, 2005

Courtesy of Artdeal Magazine

In rereading this essay I was struck by the author's reference to "willed vulgarity".I think what she is refering to was my conscious decision to accept our basic human condition of irrationality and raw will.It is something picked up stylistically from the late Guston.We must start from "the cruel chaotic base" before we can pretend to have any"raffinement".

  Camp on Canvas: Martin Mugar        

 

“My painting is about the desire that underlies the facts,” writes Martin Mugar in the handsomely illustrated announcement for his recent show of Oil and Wax series paintings at Suffolk University. The verb “underlies” provides one key to this enigmatic and sensuous new work: the fatty tissue of Mugar’s strokes springs out from the canvas, introducing a third dimension to this art of the flat surface, and teasingly suggesting the presence of a truth under the visible evidence. “Facts,” provides another key. Considering Mugar’s evolution from the still life paintings of the 1980’s through the Hofmannesque Abstract Expressionism in the 1990’s and into his new color field phase, we are led to ponder the different sorts of “facts” that painting proposes. And, “desire.” That word is not carelessly printed on Mugar’s announcement with its luscious, sherbet colors. Nor, for that matter, is the word “painting.” These days it takes either a very naïve or a boldly sophisticated artist to put brush to canvas. Mugar is of the latter breed.

            He loves the brush, and the delicate materiality of paint, and the symbolic properties of light and shape. An early still life from 1984 shows his allegiances: behind the blockily painted, laterally displayed cups, jugs and conch shell, and in the subdued tones of ivory, cream, granite grays, and umber, stand Chardin and his later interpreters, Cézanne and Derain. Mugar’s brushwork here is forceful, and most of all one notices the subtle distinctions in hue and value on the busily articulated tablecloth, the sides and shoulders of the objects.

            Two years later, in “Still Life 1986” shown at the M. I. T. Museum, Mugar has declared a certain independence. This is no longer homage or canny apprentice work. Table top, room, and objects have been severely reduced, and the palette has lightened to a kinky range of pinks, lavenders, mustards and crocus green. In their simplified shapes, the three discernible cups or jugs are no longer presented with any gesture toward three-dimensional illusion; they hover as sculpted cloud shapes in the dense atmosphere of the painting in which solid matter and air share the same molecular formula.

            In the 1990’s, Mugar moved into a phase he calls his Abstract Expressionism. At his own pace, thoughtfully, privately, he worked his way through the idioms and evolution of Modernist painting, years in arrears of the path-breakers DeKooning, Pollock, Hofmann, Guston et al., but proving the integrity of his own shape-making and of his translation of the tradition into his own terms. Mugar’s paintings from the 90’s are exuberant affairs. Often five or six feet wide and high, painted in bold, risky, but controlled strokes, these works often suggest landscape while disturbing spatial logic and playing depths against abrupt blockages of foreground. “Self in Landscape” of 1990 depicts no “self,” but some swashbuckling black calligraphy outlines a slender central rectangle within a larger frame and arranges a perspective reminiscent of an outside scene—mounds of juicy foliage and hillish backdrop, with a deep cobalt swatch of sky above—perceived through a window. The window itself seems to be promenading through outdoor-space, not attached to any indoor architecture. Thetwo awkward calligraphic rectangles might be taken as focusing devices, and thereby as a mark of an organizing human vision—the “self” in the landscape. “Still Life” (1989) proclaims itself, in its wadded block-like shapes, a kind of assemblage of objects crowded on a table top, perhaps beneath a window sill above which succulent green stalks and a golden background are visible.  The painting permits no conventional reading of objects in gravitational space, however; planes of color—the cerulean cloud in the foreground, the salmon pink box astride it—announce their own proud color and texture rather than “objectness.”

            By the late 90’s, Mugar has cut loose still further from referential conventions. “Mulch” (1996) shares a gestural language with “Mackerel Crowded Seas” (1997), so the titles no longer serve a descriptive function so much as an obliquely symbolic one. In both of these large paintings, a massive central cluster of drippingly brushed ovals dominates the surface. In “Mulch,” this Easter egg fantasia emerges from a background of slurpy, billowing cream, salmon and mustard, while the eggs themselves are outrageously striped in peacock blue, lemon, rose and burnt sienna. “Mackerel Crowded Seas” (the phrase from Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium”) suggests nothing fishy in its crayola-flesh cluster of ovals and trailing tentacles, except perhaps a dream of explosively fertile fish eggs. In both of these paintings and their weird coloration, a strong element of camp and of willed vulgarity generates a peculiar energy.

            Around 2000, Mugar’s work took a significant turn. As he has described it, “The third period is a stepping out of the push-pull of self and group and is a painstaking sensitizing of every mark, every stroke out of which is created a purer self.” Purer self or no (a matter impossible for an outsider to judge), these new paintings, including the Oil and Wax series shown last fall at Suffolk, have radically changed their focus and their organization of incident. They present a unified surface of repeated gestures, symmetrical drips, in a limited chromatic range. They flaunt bubble gum and sherbet colors: strawberry, pale lime, baby blue, café au lait, tangerine cream, lemon ice… To distinguish one painting from another and to read each individual painting, one finds oneself peering hard at the facture of the strokes. Some of the paintings have a tighter weave than others; some allow more ragged drip at the base of the canvas; some allow one color (say, pink) to predominate in the quasi-pointilliste scheme, while others yield (say) to lime.

            Let us take, for example, a pinkish 36 by 40 inch painting from 2003. Because the wax thickens the oil pigment to an almost sculptural medium, Mugar is able to energize the surface not only by chromatic variation across the surface, but in the goopy three-dimensional events that add the further graphic element of shadow. In the 2003 canvas, a considerable downward tension is provoked by the gobs at the top of the canvas that initiate the downwardly overlapping leaf shapes. In the main pattern, the elevated strokes, tightened by wax, cast shadows beneath their scales and stalactite drips, so that suddenly this light-hearted weave is complicated, in mood, by shade, the dark underlining of each stroke, the suggestion of secrete depths and cavities. The bottom edge has an even more sinister development: the final smears protrude beyond the border, leaving a ragged bottom with bits of bare canvas exposed. Some kind of illusion is broken here, about the tidy, sugary harmony proposed by the whole painting. That order is revealed as produced by a process, possibly a violent one, capable of dissolution.

            Scanning the works in the Oil and Wax series for their small but significant differences becomes a lesson in seeing.  They all enjoy a democracy of stroke and color. But then a tiny irregularity will announce itself—such as the small salmon scale with no overhang just below the center of the small square from 2005—and become an event that affects the entire composition.

            At times these strokes suggest leaves, at times scales, at times electrons. They seem to argue that reality is composed of an underlying geometric regularity. And it appears a celebratory regularity, funky and outrageous in hue. Celebratory, that is, and even pretty, until the unnaturalness of the colors become alarming; and until we note the shadow schemes and border clots that tell a more disorderly story. With this new series, Mugar has invented a mode that is entirely his own. It has visual and tactile authority, a high degree of craft (something one no longer necessarily expects from art presented in public), and a powerful metaphysical suggestiveness. It is intelligent, sensuous painting that has kept faith with its traditions and has at the same time registered an original mode of seeing for our age of quarks and fractals.

 

Rosanna Warren