Topoi of Contemporary Culture: Thomas Kinkade, McDonalds and MoMA's "Forever Now"

For a recently curated show I attempted to write an essay about the paintings in terms of topology. I came across the more than geographic use of it in a book by Jeff Malpas, which deals with its role in understanding Heidegger’s philosophy. I didn’t want to give the impression of co-opting the artist's work for my own intellectual purposes, so I wrote about the work in the context of contemporary art. However, not a day goes by without experiencing astonishment at the power of the word topos to unlock the mysteries of how the world functions. With the show over, I will  now explore the tropic of topos in terms of the society as a whole.

Leibniz asked:” Why is there something rather than nothing?” Which was similar to Heidegger marveling that “things function”. Both express awe in the face of the amazing phenomena of life on earth. And both are questions meant to generate a meditation on our being in the world. Heidegger prefaced any understanding of functioning by insisting we are already in a world shared with other people and any functioning takes place within a certain economy (Reiner Schurmann’s word for topos) i.e. there is an overall shape to how we interact in the world and with people, an ongoing back and forth and a moving forward. Most often that configuration is given or imposed on us. For example we work in a certain place where our activities are highly structured. It has its hierarchy, its obligations: it may be funded by state taxes or it may be capitalist and depend on profits. The shock of the unforeseen may be softened by the purchase of insurance. All this gives a workplace a certain appearance and predictability over time. The way things look is the purview of art and each economy will have a certain appearance. The Soviet Union for example looked a certain way that perfectly reflected its top down management of the economy.  I read recently how the dour feel of Moscow during the Soviet Era that I witnessed in the early Seventies while touring Eastern Europe, quickly became energized with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the concurrent influx of western capital. I recall during that tour through the Soviet Bloc how the absence of a market economy resulted in strange local markets such as one that only sold locally produced cherries. Tasty and fresh but I was not interested in having them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In a search for the use of the term Zombie Formalism on the Internet, I came across a site that rambled on about what they thought was the capitalist origin of the white cube, i.e. the typical gallery space. The Marxist tilt of the language implied that galleries provide a certain topos of indifference so as to let the object appear to be more valuable and significant as a commodity than it really is. I wrote a comment on the site invoking another Heideggerian concept of “letting be”. How far do we have to deconstruct things? Does every capitalist structure have to be analyzed as a power game that reduces everything to commodification? I recalled the efforts of a Marxist friend to do his own dental work with store bought epoxy so as to avoid participating in the Capitalist system by going to a dentist. However, this article nonetheless helped me understand the topos of the gallery, when it became an issue in the show at Kimball Jenkins whose exhibition space was funky to say the least. Some viewers complained about its lack of neutrality and the compromising of the work of several artists, whose work would have been better showcased by white walls. Whether it is a capitalist conspiracy or not the topography of a gallery does have a say in how we interact with the exhibited object.

 

Koons

“Hyperallergic” recently published a review of a book on Thomas Kinkade and his demise. It appears that he was a simple sort of guy who tried to peddle his work at country art fairs until he fell into the hands of shysters who turned him into a nationwide purveyor of schlock. Sort of like Koons’s kitsch but without the irony. (Koons has yet to open up franchises selling his work or put little koonsies in a McDonald Happy Meal).  I started thinking of his scenery of quaint country cottages as a notion of the topos of family and security. The smoke rising from the chimney, the calm of a setting sun bathing the scene in a warmish light. This was a mood that mattered to him. And those who bought the work needed that story and sentiment as well. When I drive to Concord NH from Portsmouth on Route 4 there is a stretch of road midway that goes through a state forest. A mountain stream and white pines and hemlocks sidle up to the road to create a very bucolic setting. Just before this environment comes to an end and the commercial sprawl that typifies the rest of the road recommences there is the view of a lone antique farmhouse across the river. It is as idyllic as a Thomas Kinkade or a Claude Lorrain for that matter. For a moment it seems that to live there would be to live happily ever after.

 

Thomas Kinkade

The topoi of our modern world have long left that sentiment far behind, ever since the Enclosure Acts abolished the yeomanry of England sending the poor to work in “the dark satanic mills”. The appearance of the past lingers on in New England where you can jump back several centuries surrounded by the rural past of countless New England villages. I once worked on a conservation commission with a woman who bemoaned the disintegration of the Maine town where we lived into urban sprawl using the word yeomanry to describe the people who lived in those majestic Maine farmhouses that still dotted the landscape. Even a place as close to Boston as Marblehead is a time warp of epoch proportions where the rest of the world could easily drop away as you lose yourself in the time of Nathanael Hawthorne. To continue my thesis, these topologies are the remnants of once lived realities that historically minded people have succeeded in preserving. But the topoi of the present awaits us on the highways engineered to allow cars to drive at incredible speeds and surrounded by malls and fast food outlets. 

The first job I had teaching was at a private prep school where I taught among other classes a course on architecture. I had no training at all in the subject but my interest in perceptual issues allowed me to discuss reasonably well how architecture constructed space and time. It helped that the textbook we used by Charles Moore discussed those issues as well. Once I took the students on a field trip to Boston to visit several buildings of interest to the course. The students seemed intent on making a pit stop at McDonald’s. I agreed to do it only if they did a space/time analysis of the experience. In our discussion we observed that the reality of Mac Do’s was totally dependent on the car and a notion of time, which engaged a rapid turnover of customers. Lots of customers out on errands in their cars with no time to sit down for a meal consuming factory produced food that could be prepared and consumed in the twinkling of an eye. It is a very tight feedback loop. The goal was to squeeze as many customers into the shortest time span possible. The interaction of parts created a topology that went far beyond the moment of the purchase of the food. Factory farms for the sandwich contents, factory production to process it and factory distribution within the restaurant. All consumed sitting in your factory made car. Here again Heidegger provides the wonderful notion of enframement, i.e. you are trapped!

I was perusing the catalog of the “Forever Now” (Painting in an atemporal world) show at MoMA at a bookstore in New York on a Sunday before I had to head home to the New Hampshire woods. The first thought that came to my mind upon reading it was something that Peter Schjeldahl picked up on in his “New Yorker “ article on the show: much of the work is derivative of the Neo-Expressionism of the 80’s. There is a shallow attempt in the catalog article to put the burden of the work’s meaning on the influence of the internet and its sense of the atemporal by resurrecting the writer William Gibson who wrote about the early days of the web, when the novelty of cyberspace still reigned. Putting aside the references to the internet, I tried to get my head around the notion of almost forty years of painting stylistically the same. For me the title and the work evoked existential nausea as it proclaims: there is no escape from this art (to use the title of Sartre’s play) which will linger on forever and ever. Amen! The notion of the atemporal once evoked a sense of eternal values worthy of surviving the flux of the human condition. The strategy of these artists is to engage in a notion of time that is eternally uniform. It reminds me of something I recall in philosophy of a negative notion of time made up of a repetition of “nows”. Lived time is full of tragic reversals and magical overcomings. In this work there is no agonic attempt to surpass the masters: just abstract gesture that is endlessly deconstructed tongue in cheek.  

"Carlotta" Charlene von Heyl 2013

Sharon Butler once quoted Beckett to me after a lecture she gave at MECA: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” in order to explain the intellectual underpinnings of Provisional/Casualist painting. From Beckett’s point of view the self that imagines that its constructs of reality can shape the real is a false self. An authentic self is one that accepts the distance between self-construct and the real. One that is set up for failure a priori. The romantic whose self -image expands to engulf the real is embodied in the sadist Pozzo in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” who tortures the not so lucky, Lucky. Pozzo is the image of Western man created in the Baroque that imposed an economy of slavery and exploitation upon the world based on a metaphysical confidence grounded in an eternal God. Didi and Gogo are the embodiment of contemporary man who is not sure of his goals and bereft of the metaphysical underpinnings of the past. We are always going to fall short or fall bad.  But it is one thing to attempt meaning and fail; it is totally different to assume failure and couch your work in a feigned sense of futility. Or not to allow any meaning at all as the Zombie Formalists assert. But what kind of meaning do you want? The work of the modernist has a positive meaning with its faith in science and a clear sense of the subject/self or its reversion to the chthonic symbolism of the pagan. But isn’t the irony of this irony that somewhere once upon a time there was a kind of painting that was too authoritative for this new eternity of weak painting to exist at all. In its insistence on irony it keeps blocking any chance of a new language of time and space. It is a kind of negative religion, a negative eternity from which we can’t escape with its own rituals that any good MFA student can learn.

It seems that history is divided into periods that are transformative of human nature and those where the transformations are digested or put in question. Without a doubt the 20thc was an era where the Human was transformed into a rational animal disabused of any notion of the individual as a separate entity with his or her own space and time. So what are we to do with it? I know the post-modernist goal is to abandon the scientific/rational self that creates experimental events on canvas that reveal the mechanical shape of reality as a tight part/whole rule based relationship. Its practice can be seen in the work of Mondrian, Stella, Judd and Serra among others that populate the modernist pantheon. As its rules penetrate deeper and deeper into the fabric of society it is no longer the hard nuts and bolts of the factory that Chaplin mocked in Modern Times but the technological precision of the Internet that infiltrates our very reality. Maybe this is the domain of the Zombie Formalists. It is no longer an issue of creating the rational man but of dissolving mankind altogether into rationality. The Provisional painters try to humanize abstraction, make it vulnerable therefore corroborating Butler’s contention of having its roots in Beckett.

 

Lucian Smith 2012 "Two Sides of the Same Coin"

It is no surprise to me that abstraction has had a revival. The avant-garde seems ever confident that every new critique of society will have a welcoming audience. The latest Koons’ extravaganza I believe left a bad taste in the collective unconscious of the public. My response was pretty much: So what! Warhol already covered that territory with sharper nihilistic wit. The need to jump over years of pop, concept and installation art back to abstraction seems akin to someone who has had a schizophrenic break and tries desperately to regain the world before the split, when things were whole. Is the attempt to return to the garden also generated by a fear of the unknown, which is now so great that we feel apprehensive about turning our back on the pinnacle of American art (AbEx promoted by the CIA as the best America had to offer during the Cold War) lest we no longer recognize who we are? But we can’t recreate its greatness, just as we no longer have our parent’s self-assuredness. We are neither the mothers nor fathers who built the modern industrial state for which modernism was the topos. Either we use abstraction ironically or pathetically (with pathos), or expunge any remnant of the self and let art blend into technology by destroying the boundaries of the human and the machine. Any hermeneutic to go back is doomed to miss the essence of the past. Contemporary abstraction is caught in a twisted embrace with Modernism which ever escapes its hold and retreats further and further into the past. How much longer will we  limp along in this contorted topology, that knows vaguely where it came from but for sure does not know where it is going. 

Martin Mugar

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

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