Spiraling downward: From Minimal to Material

Stella Zambezi series

Robert Linsley's  New Abstraction has an interesting blog post on the notion of symmetry, that got me thinking about several of the artists that he mentioned, as well as an earlier blog on Stella, who is his “main man” in Modern painting.  This is what I wrote on his blog:

“I was thinking lately about Richter in terms of the timelessness of his work. By that I don’t mean the timelessness that would be used to describe the Neo-Platonic art of the Early Renaissance but rather a lack of time. Haacke’s closed system has a sort of circular time. It is as you say a closed system that keeps repeating two different states of being. Similar to

Stella’s “Zambezi” that you commented on in another post that to my eye draws the eye in and out in a constant repetition. Richter’s painting is just one event that cannot circle back like Stella’s and although his works literally “hold up”, they risk and do at times descend into pure materiality. This embrace of the material results in what I would call art that is “time poor” to transpose a Heideggerian notion of “world poor”. This applies to the work of someone who appears to be a Richter neophyte, Dan Colen at Gagosian. I wrote about Richter and Stella on the occasion of last winter’s show of my work with Pollaro in Boston, where I talk about the materiality of Richter but this notion of time is new and I think relevant to the understanding of his work.”

Richter

It appears that Richter wants to stop time to impress one event on the viewer to such a degree that it eliminates any consideration of what came before or after. Paul Pollaro referred to it as a kind of neon blast. Gone is the role of the imagination, which might evoke memory, or the role of symbols that could point to an inner structure of consciousness that shapes the present. It is like a TGV passing by so quickly you cannot even see it as a fixed entity. Serra’s charcoal drawings have that kind of powerful presence. They capture a one/two punch in a heightened version of push/pull.

Serra charcoal drawing

“To seal becoming with the character of being. That is the supreme 'Will to Power' “. This statement by Nietzsche might be of help in sorting out what these modern artists are after. What it means is the following: Will to impress emphatically the individual presence in such a way that its power eliminates any other entity being part of the whole. In the end there is the winner and the winner creates or pushes into the background or rather completely out of site the loser.

 It is such a twisting of the original meaning of being and becoming: The source of Being in the Greek world was “The one” that existed beyond this world and in a strange way was the origin of this world. But it was hidden from the world and not of easy access. The world we live in is a world of becoming, of beings (small b) coming into existence and passing out of it. It is therefore a world of life but also of the decay of that life. In the NeoPlatonic work of the Renaissance mystics like Ficino referred to this world as the sub-lunar world which the individual had no control over. Individuals were subject to the blind laws of the stars and pulled by the moon toward death. 

Botticelli's "Birth of Venus"

Some of the great works of art such as the "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli were created as magical talismans to give the patrons such as the Medici’s power over such maladies as melancholia. According to the astrological notions of the time melancholy was influenced by Saturn and the only antidote to it was to channel the goddess Venus. The goal was to get beyond (transcend) this sub-lunar world by accessing the divine powers.

Piero della Francesca

This transcendence was not achieved through an act of will but by knowing the right prayers or alchemical formulas or in the case of art to use the right proportions, colors and geometrical shapes. In short, a kind of knowing to achieve harmony. How different from Nietzsche’s formula, which opens the door to limitless assertion of power. It is not a statement that encourages relationships and harmonies but aggressive stopping of any alternative except that which is imposed by the “Will to Power”.

Al Held

de Kooning

Self-assertion in the work of early Al Held pushes stuff into the background. This is also true in a lot of de Kooning’s work. At least there is a relationship in that on the canvas the oppressed shapes are still seen. Late de Kooning  enters a realm of pure movement. Richter shows nothing eliminated. There is just this eternal present of pure movement.

Late de Kooning

But the risk or rather the goal is that the assertion of will is not enough to hold up the material that is used to make the painting. This is the case of the work of Dan Colen.  I had a good laugh when it was pointed out to me by Paul Pollaro that this artist works in bubble gum and tar. My work has been described as looking like it was painted with bubblegum and Pollaro’s work is made with tar: One artist working with the materials that we use separately.

Dan Colen(bubble gum)

Dan Colen(tar and feather)

There is no event in Colen, just the characteristics of the materials of tar and feather or the bubble gum that was harvested from public spaces in the city. All sprinkled with irony. Nietzsche would see this as a weakness of the will.There is not enough self-assertion to impress the self on becoming. But I would counter that this is a perverse sort of self-assertion like a child throwing a temper tantrum or getting attention by flinging its turds at its parents.*

* see: "The Impossibility of Transcendence in American Art"
* see my review of Stella at the Whitney

I can be followed on twitter @mugar49

Billy Lee:A former colleague from UNC-G whose work can be found in sculpture gardens throughout the world

"Guardian of Nature" 2000

"Split "1996

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I was first introduced to Billy Lee’s work in the mid 80’s when he was a candidate for a teaching post at UNC-Greensboro and I was on the selection committee.  His work at that time made it clear that he was very much an artist in the Modernist tradition. His imaginatively engineered geometric wall pieces spoke of the ground and pattern of an underlying reality. His demeanor was imbued with the air of someone aware of his accomplishments. And indeed in the modernist realm he has accomplished a lot. He came to the US in the mid- Seventies from England to study as a Kennedy Scholar at MIT ‘s School of Advanced Visual Studies and subsequently had risen up in the ranks at the University of Michigan. The senior faculty at UNC-G were not uninterested in the work presented for his application but were more intrigued by those candidates influenced by Postmodernism which was exemplified at that time by the style of sculptor Tom Otterness. The tide of Modernism that had filled the top ranks of many of the top schools in the country during the Sixties and Seventies such as Michigan was already beginning to subside. If Otterness was all cleverness, play and social relevance, Billy embodied the seriousness and purity of a scientist looking for the logical shape of the visual world. It seemed to me his seriousness about the role of a coherent visual language in the making of art, made him a good choice to be a professor at UNC-G and I think more importantly stood him in good stead as a sculptor for the next 30 years.

Billy Lee has always been a maker and shaper of material. For several years between his stints at Michigan and UNC-G he lived in Vancouver,B.C. where his extended family resided. He got involved in some building and renovation projects in the family business. I remember he talked about them with the same relish he would talk about sculpture. His preternatural drive is to reach out into our physical world and reshape and remake it. He is an artist who spontaneously connects with the material and the processes that allow him to manipulate it. That love of material places him in the company of such artists as Ron Bladen, Carl Andre and Richard Serra among others of that generation for whom sculpture reflects back on its reality as physical material and the raw physicality of the world.

Billy Lee knows that tradition thoroughly and can talk about it cogently. In our last meeting at UNC-G where I returned recently to give a talk on my work, it was a thrill to hear him bring up the above mentioned names from the Sixties and Seventies, which he said he was trying his best to put back on the radar screen of today’s students. He has internalized that tradition but surprised me when at the beginning of the Millenium he made an uncanny return to the figuration of Henry Moore. If there is a dynamic of material vs. form in all sculpture and if you were to calculate which dominates in any given artist, Moore’s art would fall on the side of form taking the upper hand. The same thing happened in Billy’s work.

"Sentinels"1994

Since Moore the history of sculpture would evince a split of materiality from form,  and, moreover, the notion of form becoming ever more detached and Platonic in the work of Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt. Materiality now detached from form, would often become absolutely formless. This is to say nothing of the development of installation art and its tendency toward a political critique of commodification. The notion of sculpture as a terrain for conveying the traditional push and pull of natural forces in the universe has not found many adherents in the contemporary scene. And in the arts ever obsessed concern for the New you have also the mix of recent technologies such as cell phones that succeed in dissolving the intimate interaction of viewer and sculpture that has defined sculpture from its very beginning.

"Helmet" 1997

What is lost in all of these evolutions and permutations of sculpture in the last thirty years and has not been lost on Billy is the notion of the artist as someone who creates himself in making and building within an ancient tradition of sculpting. He is a maker who knows the language’s roots which go back to the Kouros of the Greeks or the ancient Cycladic forms of the Aegean.The notions of a body in space and time defined by gravity, negative and positive space, of heft and haptic touch, of the slow movement of the body and eye as it moves around the sculpture inform all his work. But informing it more deeply is his understanding of the will that allows the self to persevere and to hold one’s physical place in the world. I have always marveled at the  psychic force and energy that Billy applies to the building of his sculpture.Is not this the ultimate meaning of works :They embody the will to create. They are the artist creating himself.

His series on warrior’s helmets, which reference images of armed men and which are a looming presence throughout the history of sculpture, are emblematic of individual self-assertion but also of holding one’s ground. Warriors can also double as guardians or sentinels, both titles of work done over the last ten years. Guardians and sentinels sacrifice themselves for the group in order to establish barriers, deciding who can enter or leave the homeland. Except for the Big Head series that allows for an ironic interpretation there is a seriousness about Billy’s work that is startling, because it has been so absent from art since after the Abstract Expressionists: the artist as hero, as Mahler in the European sense. This  leads to another notion about his work: these sculptures represent a defense of the precious values of sculpture’s homeland from the effacement of the modern tide.

Most contemporary sculpture inserts itself in a dialogue about man’s place in society or in relationship to the ever changing world of technology. It comes out of sociology, critical theory and deconstructionist ontology. It’s message is a reminder that we cannot transcend the way in which the media and technology define us. We are like a fly caught in a spider’s web of societal norms. Lee’s work suggests that our individuality cannot avoid its mythic roots. Our individual efforts embed themselves in ancient tropes of meaning that we are unable to escape. When we confront their power and inevitable reality it is like the epiphanies at the end of a Greek Drama. They are as transformative as the energy contained in a Guan Yin figure or a Michelangelo pieta.

P.S.

I have been out of touch with Billy Lee for awhile. I feel I should now back away from the melancholy mood of this piece and this more recent piece as Billy has made a leap into the world of global art where the influence of Koons and Oldenburg take over. It is no longer metaphysical and inward looking but has joined the currency of an extroverted global culture. Amazing leap out of metaphysics as Derrida would say. His roots in the UK are nicely dealt with here in this interview on the BBC.

"Changsa"

"Modern Painters" considered this article for publication in an issue on Cezanne.The editor, Karen Wright, said it was "thought provoking".

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Impressions of France: Money, Renoir, Pisarro and Their Rivals

Fall 1995,The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Impressions of France”, a somewhat unwieldy exhibition of French landscape painting from the mid to late 19th century documents parallels and differences between mainstream landscapes painted principally for purchase by the French State and those of the Impressionists which although contemporaneous were not initially considered worthy of acquisition by the French Government. The work of Cezanne, Pisarro, Monet and Sisley on view represent a way of seeing that is now considered to be the foundation of modernism; on the other hand in the Salon landscapes we witness the winding down of a universally accepted style that had had its origin in the Baroque and which in the hands of the French Salon painters becomes decidedly decadent . This simultaneous winding down of one style and the burgeoning growth of another raises questions of how historically styles succeed one another. The notion of what is decadent and what authentic looms large in this show and most importantly the role that individual vision and imagination play in establishing a new style.

According to Michael Baxandall’s book ”Shadows and Enlightenment” scientists and artists of the 18th century were interested in the nature of perception and in particular the way the retina translates patterns of light and dark into form. According to Baxandall the authenticity of an artist such as Chardin lies in great measure in his ability to convey the notion that the observed is the invention of the seer. #1. The paintings center of gravity is always within the observer. The acceptance of a unique light source and the fluency and immediacy of the brush strokes contribute as well to the sensation that we are inside the artist’s consciousness. Although the narrative and the social implications are important, the studied expression of the perceptual experience as visual event is primary. In the case of the salon painters the center of gravity seems to lie outside the viewer in the landscape and with the story the landscape would convey to the socially dominant class that might purchase the painting. All socially relevant detail is explicitly represented: The geographical location, recognizable monuments such as Chartres Cathedral, the social class of the people in the landscape (usually peasants). The brush strokes vary within each painting depending on what they are conveying .The formulas and motifs are repeated enough to be identified as such: over and over we are served up the road narrowing in perspective and several individuals strolling along this road which reaches its vanishing point midpoint in the horizon.

The overwhelming mood of the Salon paintings is one of melancholy . The oversized canvasses with their large expanses of sky, sea or field induce a feeling of disorientation . The preferred time of day is dusk. The self that is manifest is not the strong self that eventually dominates 20th century art from Picasso to deKooning and Serra. In the salon painting man is clearly not the measure by which the expanse of space is parceled out. These artists believe naively in the illusion that chiaroscuro creates.  Once that illusion is established, the references to social narrative abandon both the facticity of the objects represented and the object making ability of the eye. The artists space is neither universal nor personal but one of shared social assumptions and prejudices, especially those assumptions based on institutions such as the Church and the bourgeoisie which represent the conservatism of the dominant social order. To convey the dominant role of the former, Churches figure prominently in many of the paintings and to reassure the bourgeoisie of its control over the working class comforting images of peasants quietly accepting their burden of labor in the fields fill numerous landscapes.

How were the Impressionists capable of becoming the “forerunners of modernism” affecting ultimately a sea change in art, which relegates their competitors of the academy to the dustbin of history. Merleau-Ponty in an insightful essay on Cezanne, entitled “Cezanne’s Doubt” provides a possible explanation in his description of the psyche of the most important artist of the pre-modernist revolution. #2 In Merleau-Ponty’s view Cezanne is clinically schizophrenic. Felicitous human interaction is beyond him. Most of his personal relationships are fraught with suspicion. Over the course of this life he appears according to the observations of townsfolk to become more and more embittered and alienated. Although lacking in the social skills of the world and according to his childhood friend Emile Zola insensitive to the social and political issues of the late 19th century France, he was exquisitely attuned to the shape that the impressions of the observed world took within him. These are impressions not shared with his fellow citizens. There are no labels on his paintings either figuratively or literally like the name on the stern of a boat on Elodie La VIllette’s painting that situates the landscape for the viewer in Dieppe. A church or anything recognizable except primordial rocks, trees and sky, does not dominate Cezanne’s landscape. The impressions are configured into an architecture where each stroke is part of a whole. There is no sloppy variation of style from part to part as we see in the Salon painters.

The thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s essay is that Cezanne’s illness defined his attitude toward painting. Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to distinguish this emotional background from Cezanne’s project, which starting from the hand that nature dealt him builds out of it a noble oeuvre. What I find helpful in this analysis is the notion that that Cezanne’s illness made him incapable at both the personal and the societal level of reading the social signs that bind us to society; so that at heart he remained unsocialized and therefore eminently qualified to focus on the inner experience of apprehending the landscape as landscape rather than the role is plays in French Culture. Everything is turned inside out. The roads that meander off into the horizon from the bottom of the painting in a large number of the Salon landscapes are present in Cezanne’s paintings but he subverts the expected reality so that the road ends up closer to the viewer at its vanishing point than where it began. What serves as an entry point into the painting for the salon artists actually functions as an obstacle to entering into Cezanne’s painting.

Seeing the work of Cezanne side by side with his once well-established contemporaries accentuates the common notion of Cezanne as “farouche” and renders the Salon artist more insipid than they would appear beyond the context of this show. Cezanne’s choice of what to paint reflects the thought processes of someone who “just doesn’t get it”. In one small landscape (most of the impressionist works are noticeably smaller than those of their salon counterparts) he paints a landscape with branches obscuring the road. One can almost imagine that he was dropped blindfolded before the scene and asked to paint unflinchingly the scene before him when the blindfold was removed. He would be forced to abandon all conventions and go beyond the narrative constructs that lock us into daily life. Whereas La Villette, Bavoux and the countless unknown artist of the late 19th century continue to paint in the now fatigued manner of the of the once radical concepts of chiaroscuro and perspective, Cezanne drops down from the retina which is the locus of value perception to the striate cortex of the brain where the values are analyzed according to verticality, horizontality and diagonality. #3 Just as Caravaggio’s rigorous and powerful use of chiaroscuro spread rapidly throughout Europe to define the styles of Velasquez, Rembrandt and Vermeer, Cezanne’s understanding of the role of line direction and its relations to seeing space becomes the raw material for cubism, minimalism and various optically based art forms of the 20th century.

The implication of my interpretation of Cezanne’s personality on a general notion of the evolution of the language of painting is that stylistic change can be achieved not only by deconstructing the current visual language but by going beyond it to the underpinnings of that language which are not yet culturally appropriated. Those thinkers and artists who promote modern paradigms of cultural revolution that aim to deconstruct accepted ways of seeing at a cultural level in order to go beyond them would do well to study Cezanne. Oblivious to the social signs and symbols, the accretion of his inherited culture he could more fully discover the inner visual structure of the eye/mind. The battle of transformation is not won only by questioning the notions of the current visual order but by digging deeper into the structure of the eye/mind itself. That the possibilities of the language of chiaroscuro had run their course could only be understood by a few people who were not easily seduced by its current incarnation as a vehicle for describing the social order of the late 19th century. The creation of these artists was anew language, more vigorous and inclusive of varieties of the visual experience, which grew out of how the landscape was internally apprehended, not what is was supposed to represent externally to the class of collectors and cognoscenti of the time.

#1 Baxandall, Michael.” Shadows and Enlightenment”, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

#2Merleau-Ponty,Maurice “Cezanne’s Doubt” in “Sense and Non-Sense”, Translated by Hubert L. Derives and Patricia Allen Derives, 6th edition (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 1991) pages 9-25

#3Hoffman,Howard S, “Vision and the Art of Drawing”, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989) pages 48-67.