Lighting Out for Territory , a group show at the Kimball Jenkins Galleries in Concord NH

I have curated a show of painting at the Kimball Jenkins School of Art 266 Main St in Concord,NH(right off I 93). It includes Susan Carr,  Martin Mugar, Addison Parks, Paul Pollaro and Jason Travers. It will be up for the Months of March and April.The opening reception is 5-7 on Friday March 13th.There is also an article I wrote for the Concord Monitor that I wrote .Link Here

ESSAY FOR THE SHOW   

When the artists in this exhibit exchanged emails with ideas for the show’s title, I had hoped to push a concept involving “topos”, the Greek root of the word topology. I have always had affection for ancient Greek words that embody concepts about the shape of existence such as “logos” or “aletheia”.  In taxonomy Latin is used to provide distinct forms, for philosophy Greek provides distinct concepts. When thinking about Paul Pollaro’s work some years ago the word Chthonic, which means “hidden under the earth”, came to mind as a way to encapsulate what his work is about. He liked it. It may be a fallacy in this post-modern world to fall back on words, which evoke essences. But it provides a ground for our thinking; in short a topology, a place to stand on (understanding). So be it. I am not post-modern.

Paul Pollaro "Mound Point Armor's Grace" 2014

Mugar

“Topos” didn’t go far in discussion especially when I suggested it should replace painting as the noun to underpin the show. No! We are painters seemed to be the consensus and that was that. I wasn’t going to force the issue. In any case I agree, we are painters first and come out of the world of painting. In our search for a title, I recalled from my high school days the line spoken by Huck Finn at the end of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that he wanted to  “light out for the Territory.” The context was that American Civilization as it was shaped and defined by slavery pre-civil war was pretty murky and Huck thought he needed to flee somewhere to try out new options. That phrase is embodied in American Westerns, which are often set in the unincorporated territories of the West, where conflicting interests were not easily adjudicated as laws were either non-existent or unenforceable. It dawned on me I had injected the notion of “topos” through the backdoor. Territory is derived from terra and is probably the latinate word for “topos”. Artists are always nagged by a need to move out to some new terrain, to not stay put. The “the” before territory got dropped along the way, but that worked as well since artists are not moving out into a specific place but their own psychic plot of ground. Huck’s words struck a chord and stuck.

There is a mixture of buoyancy and alacrity in the phrase. There is also a sense of sneaking off, shirking one’s duties. Both aspects apply to the artists in this show; impatience with the status quo of art, and a letting go of the topics we were told in school were the only route for a serious painter. The artists in this show are New Englanders by choice or by birth, a part of the country known as being overly civilized and cerebral.  Tell anybody west of the Mississippi that you come from New England and they will call you an abolitionist or expect you to wear a three-piece suit. I heard from a carpenter who works winters in Arkansas that they like to hire Yankees down there as foremen. They are good taskmasters. We are hard on ourselves too, our own taskmasters. The artists in this show inhabit the same rugged inner psychological terrain as the New England poets such as Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell. Or artists like Hopper, Hartley, Marin.

 

Susan Carr 2013     

The original impetus for this show came from a message on Facebook informing me that my painting accepted for the annual “Off the Wall” show at the Danforth Museum last June was hung side by side with Susan Carr’s work. The message said it was a fortuitous paring as both of us work our paint heavily off the surface. I recalled her name from a show curated by Addison Parks in the late Nineties at Crieger-Dane in Boston called “Severed Ear. (the poetry of abstraction)” that brought together the work of New York artists such as Richard Tuttle and Leon Polk Smith with Boston artists such as Tim Nichols, Addison Parks and myself. I went on to Facebook to look up Susan’s work. I could see immediately why we were put side by side. A love of paint but more than that an impulsion of the paint to reach out as though pushed by some energy not constrained by logic. Chthonic seemed to apply here, except it was more the thrust of molten lava than the earth itself.

Susan Carr

To select the rest of the participants was not difficult. We are all painters, a distinction that makes a difference these days and moreover we all are in our own way artists who want to put back together what was torn asunder in painting over the last fifty years. We don’t ignore the ideas that motivated that deconstruction but work with them. There is a paring down of art to bare essences in the Greenbergian ethos of painting. And it extends to the point where artists start taking the very material and ground of the painting apart. Where does it end? The work of Kelly, Stella, Ryman, Tuttle and Richter, artists I’d like to label as artists of the ‘bare minimum’, informs our painting.  They provide us with the iconic shapes and notions of canvas as sculpture set free by their research into the underpinnings of painting. But our plan is to do something different to them.

So Huck Finn has to light out for new territory, out from the concentration camps of the slave states. Among the artists in this show there is a conviction that the terrain of Modernism that they grew up in, admired, studied and accepted is not the endgame for painting and not to be rehashed ad nauseam. All that was jettisoned from Minimalism: earthiness, anxiety, passion, affection, mystery, magic, surprise, place and space the so-called attributes of the real which were somehow secondary to concepts and ideas come back to haunt the work of these artists. I once seemed perplexed about how personal experience came to inform artwork. You spend time in nature, you move in it, dig in it, touch it smell it, but where and how does it feed into the painting. Addison said it does unbeknownst to you. It is absorbed through your pores, the accumulation of days and nights inhaling the smells of autumn and one day haptically without forcing the issue it pops up in your work. You just let go and it does its magic. The touch and feel of being in the world rejected by the bright lights of logic come back to haunt these painter.

 

Jason Travers "Illusion" Corot's Field 40"x65" 2014

Jason Travers turns “the bare minimum” into a question: ”Is that all there is?” Can this earlier generation of artists proclaim once and for all that an aesthetic broken into parts should be the last statement of painting? For Travers working inside this tradition on panels of pure color or value, each panel becomes an event created patiently over time of endless strokes and marks like someone scratching to escape their enclosure, or insisting that the analytic event that takes apart is important but not more than the abiding presence of the human touch. The multiple panels and the foregrounding of texture are his acceptance and participation in the thinking of the “bare minimum” but at the same time the 19^th century of Turner or is it Ryder pops up in certain panels of Travers paintings in part as nostalgia for a bygone world but hints with the slow time of the hand and touch at new notions of time and terrain to light out for. But in the true spirit of a Modernist he raises more questions than he answers.

 

Addison Parks"Wroots" 24"x18"  oil on linen 2014

Addison Parks uses the tradition of abstraction literally as a background for a foregrounded gestural event yet more recently he has foregrounded the abstract pattern.  He acknowledges its role in giving to pure colors an iconic force. However, he learned personally from Tuttle’s evolution as an artist that breaking down has to be followed by putting back together. Tuttle, himself, was as much a maker as a deconstructionist: But what forces us to put things back together is life itself. Parks’s  work asks in the end: are we just scientists working isolated in our studio/laboratory? If we are alive to nature, our family and those around us in the larger community, then our art must reflect the constant merging and rearranging of our relationships. His works are events, transitory moments of meaning where things fall into place. But any arrangement no matter how ecstatic implies that true to life in the end it can only be transitory.

Mugar

In a recent blog post I discussed the possibility of painting jumping out of the “enframent” of technology. The word was coined by Heidegger to describe the domination of technology over our thinking about the world. If one accepts the premise that much of modern art has been enframed by the methodological notion of providing simple shapes that are easily recognizable, (Husserl’s eidetic reductions) then the question could arise: how can you get back to the garden where all the reductive parts find their whole again. I discussed this issue in relation to my work and came up with the notion of waiting. Painting not as a power play but as an opening up to possibility. When I began this body of work now in its 15^th year, I started not from reduction but multiplicity, a field of colors. All that has initiated change in the work has come about from questions such as: What happens when you use a frosting applicator to create a gesture with volume and smooth surfaces? What happens when you use letters instead of individual marks? The answer to this last question has thrust my painting into the earth/world dichotomy, that Heidegger established, moving it from the earth side of the equation to world side.

 

Paul Pollaro "A Light of Dark.Hyperbolic and Elliptical Graph "2015

Paul Pollaro’s work is in part about the dark light of nature. Not the optical light that lights the world but the energy that radiates from rocks and plants, something that you can pick up with infrared cameras. He has succeeded in pushing the envelope of physicality but most recently the work turned on him in a most unpredictable way. Like Travers and Parks the self-awareness of the paintings presence and language comes from the artists of the “bare minimum” and in particular Richter the master of paint as paint and the canvas as sculptural presence. In his latest work the dichotomy of nature and culture meet in a way that has allowed him to engage the same earth/world dichotomy found in my work. It asks the question: are the abstract constructs of the mind also nature?

Addison Parks"Well Being" oil on linen, 16"x20", 2014 

In a blog post I wrote about the French painter Jean Helion, I drew a parallel between his prison camp experience in Germany in WW11 that reduced him to a raw unit of labor(arbeit macht frei) and the abstraction that he rejected after the war. All he could think about besides trying to survive during his confinement was the vibrancy of life in Paris. When he escaped and came back to Paris, he abandoned abstraction and embraced figuration in the form of paintings of people in urban settings. I thought of a parallel evolution in style in the work of Stella and Held who abandoned the minimalist trope of their early work to embark in their later years on multifaceted paintings, where there was a complex relation between the parts and the whole. Jean Helion was subjected to a physical and emotional “minimalism” by the Nazi’s. Was the minimalism of abstract art a sort of scientific asceticism in some way parallel to the emotional oppression of life in prison camp?  The essence of this show speaks to the primacy of life in the creative process and the topography of time that does not try to crush the spirit but opens up islands to the stream.  To borrow the title of Addison Parks’s novel: ”Love and Art, in that order”.

"Flotsam"Jason Travers

Boston art, The Marathon Bombings, Robert Lowell and other things that got me thinking

But so it goes for the narrators of the art world.The ones who create the still space, the gallery, where art survives.The gallerists decide: they tell the story of  who is in and who is out and as one gallery director recently told me, who will have the chance to move up the feeding chain to New York and greatness. They can start someone on the race to the top, to glory, but how does it happen that one makes it, another doesn't. The reality is that the world is a very messy place. Good citizens worship at the alter of predictability.They go year in and year out to the Marathon or the July Fourth fireworks. It provides a socially acceptable venue for a little contained uncertainty. But one day some brothers from a part of the world most good Boston citizens have never heard of kill and blow off the legs of some of the spectators of the Marathon and almost end forever the fairytale of Boston, the Hub of the universe, the Athens of America. Before the perpetrators are caught our President comes to the city full of bromides and crass boosterism to pretend that we are going to bounce back, if only we tap into the enthusiasm we apply to our world championship teams. We love our routine: every year the Red Sox will start their race to the World Series and the Marathon will proclaim  the notion and primacy of bodily strength and perseverance, good Yankee self-reliance and discipline.And out of the blue really angry and delirious and, god forbid, undisciplined boys, who looked so all American with their love of sports and drugs, stain the  image of the fantasm that is Boston. But don't worry: words and more words can be poured on the fire and everything will be all right .Before the victims are buried the President and the mayor describe the city as the sports mad parody of itself and proclaim it is "Boston Strong".

At the beginning of one of my favorite novels  "Voyage au But de la Nuit" by Celine we find Bardamu at Place Clichy musing about the the nature of the universe with his friend Arthur Ganate. Ganate makes the claim that the passers-by are not on their way to accomplish anything of any worth; they are just walking about from morning 'til  evening. The proof is that , when it is cold or raining, they are fewer in number and are probably in the cafes drinking their cafes-creme or their beers. If they were truly working they would be out in all weather. So it is with the art scene. The galleries, the content providers, need only content, the empty the better;  maybe just inert content.They are just circulating like the "gens de Paris".And the artists figure this out early on. Just play the game, just show up as Woody Allen suggested. Look earnest and wear the art of the day like some hip T-Shirt. Just be sure to not be anxious or worried about the messy state of things or if you dare just do so with a certain amount of ice in our veins or as the French say: sang froid.

I recall a visit years ago to a Boston gallery.The work on display was some overly tense and fastidiously wrought sculpture by Christopher Wilmarth. The press about him talked of exquisite poetry and magic, where all I saw was someone suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder. I think he deserves all the accolades he has received but I can't help myself:  It made me nervous. The use of glass made me think that  the hidden and the dark where light cannot penetrate  had been wiped clean. How that happened I don't know? Medication, enlightenment, pure rationality? In the gallery were a couple, who appeared  to be collectors .They were being told the story of Wilmarth by the gallery director.I don't know if the story included his suicide at the age of 44. Their clothing had the same fastidiousness and precision of the sculpture. Excellent cloth,well pressed shirts. It extended to the man's nicely trimmed moustache. From the quality of the cloth I could discern that they could afford to be collectors of art. I imagined them both lawyers finessing contracts day in and day out, cool, calm and collected.They were the sort of people that were destined to buy a Wilmarth. They were people for whom the dark and hidden was not to be considered at all in their well-oiled lives.

This past year, a friend and I had some fantasies about showing in a certain Boston gallery. The gallerist even came by our show leaving positive remarks in the guest book. All looked up and up. But the initial enthusiasm never translated into anything concrete. My gallery mate pointed out the ingenues the gallery would show and we would scratch our heads in disbelief. What he showed was so dry and predictable. My gallery mate's emotions run deep and reach back into history, with oracular depth. The void hovers around his work and almost devours it. The paintings were the artist's soul turned inside out. But we forgot to consider the clients of these gallerists,  Boston's rich and monied class, the ones who made it playing the stock market or in real estate, All is calculation and ratiocination.Nothing messy or scary, or, if it is, make sure you keep it at the level of a hint or a sleight of hand.The numbing redundancy of affectless work.

Occasionally, Boston looks at its soul and sees sorrow and loss and does not cover it over with bombast and rhetoric. So it was with Robert Lowell 50 years ago.

At the beginning of the Sixties Boston was reduced to a parking lot with the onslaught of urban renewal. The tax base was no longer there to support the city so the Federal Government came in with cash to knock down the 19th century and to replace it with anonymous buildings reminiscent of Soviet bloc architecture. The high tech boom was years away and the Boston I remember was not a pretty place. Robert Lowell, influenced by the "Swan" of Baudelaire, who himself bemoaned the Haussmannian demolition of Paris, wrote probably his greatest poem about New England and Boston  and by extension Modernity: "For The Union Dead". So much of America can easily absorb modernity since there was little before it to resist it. Boston already had three centuries of history and much of that architecture still remains. The clash of the new and old was obvious and it was easy to side with the nobility of the past. The overarching metaphor of the poem is the transfer of the reptilian and ichthyan kingdom from the contained Aquarium to our modern world. It is not a pretty picture. But then again maybe the Boston Intelligentsia  has been engaged in a concerted battle against the "dark downward vegetating kingdom" that Lowell secretly longs for. Judging from what passes for art in Boston, they have won.

FOR THE UNION DEAD by Robert Lowell, 1960

Relinquunt omnia servare rem publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles,
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steam shovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking lots luxuriate like civic
sand piles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin-colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking

over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

The monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its colonel is as lean
as a compass needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small-town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets,
and muse through their sideburns.

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
showed Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, "the Rock of Ages,"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.