The painting of Don Shambroom

 Don Shambroom and his work looms large in my blogging that started in 2012. Mostly his opinions that have been shared with me either at visits to his studio on the Millers River in Massachusetts, via email or comments left on my blog posts. Just a presence that added up over time. What he had to say on culture and art were most often very prescient. He has a knack for thinking deeply about any subject that he decides to focus on. Most recently an interest in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp resulted in the publication of a monograph on Duchamp’s last day published by the David Zwirner gallery. In order to write the book he had to enter and hold his own in the world of Duchamp scholars and chroniclers which was no mean task.   When we first met at Yale and then again when our paths crossed in Boston exchanges were face to face. Since the advent of the internet these exchanges have been hijacked by the web and have become part of the very subject matter of his painting.  

Cow Bird

The imagery of the art world in the 20th c to my eye is torn between a Hegelian systematization and the Kantian sublime. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning define the sublime. Of course, Rothko and Newman deal with the numinous presence of the self and de Kooning with the terror (an aspect of the sublime) of being torn apart but somehow surviving to be reconstituted in the real. For these painters the artist still wields power to move the viewer. These artists represent the part that resists being overwhelmed by the whole. The Hegelian trope can be seen in the part being subsumed in the whole. Here the part can either resist strongly or acquiesce subserviently. I noticed this subservient stand in the work of Dana Schutz. She applies a cubistic language that in the end is not a structure into which parts are grounded in the real but a system that obliterates a meaningful use of the parts. It embodies the postmodern dream of the death of man. We are uploaded to the mediaverse  starting in the 50’s with the tv understood by Marshall McLuhan as messaging through it mediatic structure and coopting our whole physical reality finally on FB or at last dreamed of in the metaverse qua Oculus.  

The artists who no longer resist this effacing of the human presence can be seen in the artistic phenomena of zombie formalism that I was one of the first to talk about. It seems to have grown out of the branch of modernism that does not ground itself in the human body a case in point being Frank Stella whose early graphic design-based work is already one degree removed from embodied perception. 

String Theory 

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe a painter and critic who stumbled across my writing emailed me in direct response to something I had written about the characters in Zombie Formalism. I found it applied to the work of Dana Schutz. His words addressed the struggle of the part and the whole in any Hegelian inspired work of art where the part provides “no bodily surprise” (to quote Gilbert-Rolfe). Nothing that can break out of the whole.  He sent me a link to his writing on the Sublime. The art of Shambroom like any smart artist who wants to find his or herself engaged in understanding the human condition of late modernity has to sort out this Hegelian/ Kantian struggle of the system v.s. the Sublime. Unlike the submission to the systemic like Schutz whose visual world seems to grow out of Saturday morning cartoons or the Zombie formalists who bleed any life out of abstraction, he creates a hybrid of both the intensity of seeing by the artist one on one with things of the world and a systematic world derived from Rauschenbergian space. On the one hand the face, the individual is lifted up into a societal miasma on the other hand things of the world are granted a kind of beauty in their isolation, a stance that exalts their magic of having appeared in time and space. Like a Janus face he looks backward into the 19thc on to the Renaissance and Baroque where the artists were capable of holding up the moment and the thing in its beauteous moment of revelation and on the other absorbing the language of modernism where the human presence is swept up into a higher structure. By straddling the two worlds he is casting doubt on any attempt to see the imagery of mass culture as a superior sort of transcendence as in Warhol, a Hegelian “aufbehung” which ambiguously means both a cancelling and a lifting up. 

Symbolic Drift

This strategy of maintaining both realities side by side without sublimating one into the other, resembles the task that Ernst Junger set for himself. In his writing. He is famous for his WW1 account of trench warfare  ”Storm of Steel” that I recently learned that Don read while attempting in his own scholarly manner  to understand warfare as manifested in WW1 .For Junger WW1  represented a dramatic change in the role of the individual to technology. It is technology that drove the battle not individual acts of heroism. The book had a big influence on Heidegger’s understanding of the growing nihilistic role of technology in 20thc life that he called “enframement” and more particularly ”machination” (that continues to this day in more and more insidious fashion on the internet.)  In my own blogging I have called this transformation the “Humpty Dumpty” effect where the integration of the image of the individual into the whole as we knew it and as it is represented in the art of the west say in the work of Piero or Michelangelo is irretrievably lost as we move into the 20thc. All the king’s horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

John Singer Sargent's "Gassed"

 In the interim between the wars Junger pondered in his writing how the life of the individual might function outside of the political and technological system. achieving in “The Adventurous Heart” an  almost mesmerizing descriptions of the objects of the day to day reality that he encounters sometimes enhanced by drugs. His goal was to describe the surface of the real with such intensity so as to reveal something of a hidden reality. It also represents a shift of weight from the individual subsumed in the political to its own private inner magic. In many ways it parallels the power of many individual artist such as Picasso who functions as free agents outside the system. Or the proliferation of shamanic types in the 20thc century such as Alistair ‘Crowley, Krishnamurti  or Rudolph Steiner who attempt to integrate divinity in a post Christian  era. Another short book written by Junger between the wars “Forest Passage”  posits the strengthening of the individual in connection with the natural world as it steps outside the leviathan. I was taken aback by the first image described in “Adventurous Heart” in overwhelming detail of a tiger lily, which in turn brought to mind a painting by Don Shambroom of a daylily represented in almost stereoscopic detail. There is no postmodern cynicism in this painting. This is not the world of Yuskavage or Currin that keeps pushing the envelope to further dimensions of perversity.  The realm of Blakean innocence finds its place in Don’s openness to the opening of a flower. 

"Circle of the Lustful" William Blake

Shambroom’s art embraces a hybrid notion of the societal whole and the individual as its own kind of whole. He leans on the structure of a visual language derived from Rauschenberg  to insert images of faces known from mass media side by side with those of people in his immediate family. Sometimes there is text given the same weight as the faces and bodies. Interpenetration of the 19thc world of portraiture and that of billboards or flashing internet imagery. Everything is on the verge of overwhelming the individual. A child on a swing is impinged on by graffiti/slogans. What one must remember in observing these paintings is that everything is hand painted. There is the 20thc lingua franca of collage but the 19th c love of paint to represent the here and now. Again we are helped by a seeing Shambroom as hermeneutically orchestrating a sort of clash/crash between two periods of time and two notions of the universe, that seem to have bifurcated irretrievably to which his work  says adamantly No. The dreamscape of people carried along in a sort of cosmic stream seems to remove a purely societal critique and opens up the possibility of a Blakean insertion into a higher spiritual realm. Shambroom’s work can only make sense if seen as issuing from a shamanic magic incantation. An attempt to merge the media images of mass culture with the domestic play of children

Day Lily

Artists without faces. Or what do you hang your hat on? Jean Gabin, Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.

                         Artists without faces.

               Or what do you hang your hat on?

          Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.

.

Jean Gabin:"We had faces then"

"We had faces then." Words that describe the Hollywood actors of Gabin’s era: Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to name a few. What does it mean to have a face? A sense of fate etched into the face, when you accept the persona which is one part what life casts across your bow and the other part  how you deal with it. Maybe grounded in the singularity of Christ’s body and face on the cross as he fulfills his unique destiny/apotheosis in a discrete moment in time. Or the heroes and heroines of the Iliad born to families that already doom them to a fate beyond their control. Does not apply to Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, who still looks like to me the pre-adolescent he was one in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”. Too much a baby face to my taste for his gangster roles and Johnny Depp who always intrigued me with his performances in “Ed Wood” and “Edward Scissorhands” is not growing old gracefully. Unlike Gabin he won’t find a role  for an aging personality that Gabin created in “The Dominici Affair”. Nor will Jim Carrey transcend his iconic roles in “The Truman Show” and “The Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.  In this postmodern age the self is dischargeable, it carries not burden of debt;  it has no beginning, middle and end. Things seem to bog down in the middle. We are more Buddhistic now! Or transcendental meditators like Carrey. …In our culture if our image is no longer pretty to the public then we had rather euthanize ourselves than seem less than perfect. OK, acting is a job and your face is what you sell. But there seems to be a way that some careers transcend that purely mercenary definition. Their way of persisting to the bitter end.

Grant and Bergman

 From Wikipedia on Dietrich:

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer. Throughout her long career, which spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s, she continually reinvented herself. 

Dietrich

It might be that Hollywood no longer likes it characters to age (obviously Weinstein, the gatekeeper, liked his women young) or is it so pervasive that our society cannot accept the wisdom that comes with age. The notion of the self consistently prevailing over or outwitting  death has disappeared in our throw away culture.

                                   Belmondo did his own stunts barely surviving them

What to hang your hat on?  Nothingness?  This strange sort of erasure has oozed into the painting world. Three cases in point: Dana Schutz, Cecily Brown and John Currin.

When I wrote my seminal piece on “Zombie Formalism” I started the essay discussing some philosophical ideas that are current in academia that may be the underpinning of this new notion of self-erasure:

Gabin

“In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s  “The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Tugendhat and other 20^th c philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of Western metaphysics.  First Charles Taylor in a heading states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model, and its basic error is to construe consciousness as a relation to an object.”  The author in the first paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: ”….the subject as starting point, just as orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective communication in language the new universal system of reference.” A few paragraphs later he says:”The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.”

This is the end of the central role played by the Socratic notion of knowing thyself. Further along in the essay I write:

“The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 20th century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s “Downcast Eyes”. To make his point about the domination of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating insight and mirroring.”

The dethroning of the male gaze.

“And, of course, it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.”

Schutz

What struck me about Dana Schutz at her Boston ICA show beyond the obvious hip ”in your face” cartoony funk of the brush stroke was the un-thought out color palette. It seemed to arise out of a beginner’s paint kit of ochres and umbers with a few primary colors thrown in as spice. There was no self-doubt or even a bow to the exploration of 20thc color's ability to move the viewer. It seemed to come right out of the tube. I pointed out in my Schutz essay how in Kirchner and Beckman, who could be considered precedents of Schutz, set off the human gaze against the acid color as in  Kirchner's case or with aggressive cubism as in Beckmann’s, that both try to dissolve it. Instead of seeing the erasure or distortion of the face as a fault or lack maybe it is just the final exit of a Shakespearean/Socratic/Christian self-consciousness. The self-consciousness that arises out of the inevitability of sin or as one sees in the American Westerns the plodding perseverance of the actor who in spite of the burden of sin tries to do good and in the end can etch something substantial into the human gaze.

Currin's cloning 

But we are postmodern. We gain our identities by being part of the group/herd or experiencing no separation between the mass media and the self. Hence the cartoon faces in Schutz’s work. Currin has faces, indeed, but with his ironic gaze deconstructs the vanity of women who imagine themselves to be unique fashion plates into generic good looks. Warhol bequeaths the face to the replicability of the silk screen. But still with the recognizability of the movie star or politician of the larger culture. The persona that still might seduce us with the magic of a Dietrich or of a Garbo is in the clammy hands of Currin devoid of magic, never star quality but intentionally cloned. The snark of a scientist looking at the world through a microscope, the human entity now subject to the replication of a virus.

Cecilly Brown adds her physical presence to her work

The best abstraction acknowledges a self that is not necessarily synonymous with the human face yet tries to achieve the steadiness of a gaze constantly undercut by the psychological and bodily drives. Gorky, Pollock, Rothko had fragile mastery of those underlying forces. Our contemporary practitioner of abstract art Cecily Brown suffers from what Baxandall perceived to be the weakness of so much late 19^th c Realism. It was not grounded in the self but was merely descriptive of the current social world. The artists of the Salon painted identifiable landscapes not their perception of them. Brown thinks herself to be an abstract painter who paints abstractions in the tradition of Pollock and de Kooning but like Schutz she never thought twice about the dynamics of color and the tension of flattened space. There is no hovering of the neural matrix over the void that one finds in Pollock, the angst of Rothko knowing his colors hide the reality of one’s nothingness or Gorky’s incredible synthesis of the languages of psychology(surrealism)  and Cubism that tear at each other like angry cats. With Brown it is not zombie formalism but flaccid “Descriptive Abstraction” similar to the dead end of late Salon figuration of the 19thc. All great abstraction takes a bow to Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" with its violent flattening of space and his outrageous imposition of his portrait on the women.I am reminded of  a discussion I had with Al Held of a portrait that Matisse did of his wife that he so much admired. A compression of foreground and background that releases an explosion of energy. 

I once imagined a day when the earthy angst of the early work of Lester Johnson would matter more to our culture than what Blake Gopnik sees as the radicality of a Warhol. Yes! radical in that it uproots the human presence from any authentic meaning on earth. Once pulled away from the body and inserted into the matrix of mass media, it will never be radical in the true sense of the word again. It will roll on and on like tumbleweed over the modern desert. Still waiting for someone to create a radical art that is faithful to its real definition  that it  is “rooted” in the human presence.

Otherwise what is there to hang your hat on.

if you are interested in learning more of my ideas on art get my book on Drawing and Painting

Ideas Matter: The 1929 Davos Debate and Modern Art

The breaking away of Heidegger from his mentor Husserl's thinking is often discussed in histories of Heidegger's thought as a momentous event not just for Heidegger's evolution as a thinker but for European philosophy . What was he breaking away from and why was often unclear to me? I understood the role of Dasein in "Being and Time", that notion of lived space among others that is a priori to consciousness. I had already suspected that Husserl's eidetic reduction was an important idea shaping cognitive science. Eidetic reduction is a sort of universal construct  whereby outside reality is reduced to pure consciousness irrespective of time and space. It is a concept based on a transcendental notion of consciousness in the tradition of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Go for a hearing test and you will experience I believe this reduction in its essence. Pure tones are submitted to you in an isolation booth.Your inability to detect any of them in a full range of possible tones will indicate the health of your hearing.

Recently I read  "A Parting of the Ways" by Michael Friedman, that focuses on the famous Davos debate between Heidegger and Cassirer in 1929 and its relationship to the subsequent split in philosophy between logical positivism and existentialism. One paragraph brought into focus the abyss between Heidegger and Husserl, and clarified for me once and for all the difference between these two thinkers and in particular its possible relation of these ideas to the painting of Rothko and Hofmann.

Here is an extract from that paragraph: "Similarly, we can grasp the general natures of intuitively presented colors or tones and thereby establish  a priori "eidetic sciences" of the structures of "color space" or "tone space". And by the same method in phenomenology, we can grasp the general nature of intuitively presented psychological phenomena and thereby establish the a priori "eidetic science" of "pure consciousness....In this way, moreover, we can establish  a special and unique a priori science(which, in particular, is non-mathematical)- a science that can serve as the foundation for all other a priori sciences..."

Rothko

When I read "color space" both Hofmann and Rothko's work came to mind: the reduction of color to pure hues and its subsequent extraction of those colors from the lived space of the human life. I had dealt with this distinction in the blog:"The Humpty Dumpty effect" where the breakdown of the lived world into cognitive parts could not be put back together again. The work of these two artists have the  foundational structure of science. But Heidegger asks: what about the historical nature of mankind, both its finitude and its insertion in an historical epoch that limits or expands its sense of self. In other words: its temporality. What is brought into question by temporality is the the purity of human consciousness. Is our humanity only understood by a hearing test? Of course our lived reality is enhanced if we can invent instruments based on our scientific knowledge of hearing. But what happens when all notions of being human are taking place in a laboratory? If we consider first our bodily existence and its insertion in what Heidegger calls the "always already" of the world around us, we can see it precedes consciousness. We are thrown into reality in a time and place that is beyond our control. Heidegger's is a darker picture and more tragic picture of human existence than that of Husserl.

Hofmann

If Husserl gets Hofmann and Rothko in the world of art, who does Heidegger get? Without a doubt it is Giacometti. His figures stride blindly with an existential force that is bigger than their consciousness. They are shaped by the space around them and his drawings sculpt out a shared space of the seer and the seen. Permeating all his work is an overall anxiety that recalls Heidegger saturated Sartre's famous saying that "Hell is the other".

Giacometti

The third character that makes up the trio discussed in depth in Friedman's book is Rudolf Carnap. Although he was not a presenter at Davos he interacted with the participants and went on to an illustrious academic career as a "logical positivist" and a member of the Vienna Circle. He had some sympathy for the thinking of Heidegger in contrast to Cassirer only in so far as it was anti-idealistic. Except for Cassirer there was a drive among this trio to extract philosophy from its ground in a higher truth. But that sympathy ended there. Carnap had no tolerance for Heidegger's proclamation that "Nothing nothings". For him it was illogical and unprovable.

The politics of Germany brought Cassirer and Carnap to the United States and left the right wing Heidegger alone in Europe as its most famous philosopher.  The artists and architects of the Bauhaus such as Gropius and Albers came as well.  Friedman states that the underlying theme of this group and of Carnap as well was anti-individualistic and socialist. They found work readily in American Universities with Cassirer and Albers going to Yale and Carnap and Gropius teaching at Harvard. Carnap was a fan of the Bauhaus ideas of an architecture that no longer built monuments to the Aristocracy and the Bourgeoisie  but buildings that  managed mass society. Form as social function in architecture was their mantra.

Josef Albers

This notion of the importance of thinking as grounded in the group not the individual seems to me to favor a kind of abstraction that achieves its realization only as an integration of the part into the whole. This combined with the locus of the human consciousness in the cognitive v.s. being in the world handed the human individual meaning over to its integration into social function

Artists that fit the thinking of Carnap would of course be his fellow emigrant from Germany Bauhaus educated Albers and the Austrian sculptor with whom I studied, Erwin Hauer.

Erwin Hauer

Of course the 80's and 90's would bring to prominence the ideas of the post modernists such as Derrida, Foucault and de Man, all of whom were influenced by Heidegger's notions of deconstruction.Many of them found positions in American Universities the most famous being de Man at Yale. But that is another story for another blog post.

Schutz at the ICA Boston

Around the time I was trying to sort out the clutter of paintings qua sculpture at MassMoCA for a blog post, I received a self-published book from the gallery owner, Paul Rodgers, on his theories of the origins of 20^th Modernism. Looming large in his story of the Genesis of the Modern is Barnett Newman. Recently, as I started to put together a critique of Dana Schutz’s work at the Boston ICA, the artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe emailed me an article that he published in a collection of essays called “Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime” published by “Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies”. He had been sent my article on the end of Zombie Formalism by the artist Chris Haub, and reached out to me to share what he thought was the complementarity of our ideas on the state of contemporary art.  In Gilbert-Rolfe’s essay, Newman also comes across as an important figure in establishing the metaphysics of Modernism. Newman had never been for me a conscious influence on my painting nor for that matter someone I was excited about. I do recall the painter Don Shambroom being an enthusiast of his work. Don is a figurative painter, although lately his work has shown a more conceptual strain. That has not stopped him from often providing some of the best commentary on Abstraction of any painter I know and on my work in particular. He remarked at the time on how a Newman painting could dominate the gallery space and in so doing affect powerfully the consciousness of the viewer.  Like Rothko there is a religious import that sees the work of art as creating an architectural space similar to a chapel.

Newman

The journal in which Gilbert-Rolfe wrote his essay contains fifteen essays by other writers on the Sublime and lack thereof in contemporary art. Much of Gilbert-Rolfe’s essay deals with the structure of the art world: artists, gallerists and museums that all seem to be working under the aegis of a seamless Hegelian structure where to quote the essay “painting is the readable part of a system and causes no bodily surprises.”  This stood me in good stead when I was perplexed over any justification for the work of Dana Schutz being given a show at the Boston ICA. Until the brouhaha over her painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial I had not heard of her work. The over-explained show at the ICA presents her as having been an important presence in the art world for quite some time. Gilbert-Rolfe’s essay gave me a handle on the work. He says: “Inside the museum what the work must be about is closely controlled. “ “Hegel is invoked but there is little dialectical contradiction to be seen.”

Schutz

Each painting is given an extensive explanation as to its message. Typically, large shows like this provide the viewer with a long description at the beginning and maybe one at the end but rarely does each painting get such in depth analysis. Many of the paintings deal with social conflict, which of course was the story behind the Emmett Till piece not exhibited here. However, to lean on Gilbert-Rolfe’s citation from above, ”... there is little dialectical contradiction to be seen.” There are no ”bodily surprises.” There is an attempt to express the impact of conflict via a cubistic language that breaks up the picture plane but that is it. Unlike a great artist like De Kooning there is no pushing of cubism into a new territory. Here is a person with no doubt, no second thoughts as to the efficaciousness  of her work to convey its intended meaning.  The colors are thinly applied with no admixture. The often effaced faces deny the viewer an extra level of meaning that might be grounded in private experience. In one of the explanatory panels, references are made to Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa”. That painting of course functions on several levels where in fact there are faces that convey the personal horror of it all. Could it be that her view of mankind is so dictated by social media in which the system is so much larger than the individual as to render any part/whole dynamic irrelevant. There is in most every painting a cubistic whole implying a sort of topsy-turvy worldview but the cartoony faces give no inkling of an inner life. I guess I get into murky waters when I fault her for what may be the meaning of the individual faces that sag or are effaced. It is Dasein without the Da. Mediated faces that have lost their immediacy. Is this the message of the show: in our modern world there is “No dialectical contradiction”?

 

Kirchner

Artists like Ernst Kirchner or Max Beckmann, who seem to be her antecedents, despite the overall cubistic disarray ground their paintings in the here and now. In the case of Kirchner you have the strange colors distorting the faces that provide the shiver of existential angst. In Beckmann the very non-generic faces seem borrowed from the intensely focused portraits of August Sanders. In Schutz I see this lack of grounding in specificity as either a cognitive defect or the outcome of contemporary fatuousness that gets its sense of the real from Facebook.

 

Beckmann

Schutz is the “readable part of the system and causes no bodily surprise.” One might think that painting would retain its role in society as a locus of intense emotional and metaphysical surprises that still matter to the individual in a society where we all in some way have a role of supporting  highly efficient social functioning. But in this show the emptiness of social functioning has leaked its way into the consciousness of Schutz. No wonder the Black community protested her use of the photo of Emmett Till. Here was in an iconic image of an event that represents the Black’s struggle against the violence of Jim Crow and in no way could be dealt with effectively with the squishy visual language of Dana Schutz.

Paul Rodgers: "Modern Aesthetic"

Some years ago I wrote about an historical representation of Coney Island at the Brooklyn Museum of Art together with a performance at BAM of “The Glory of the World” on the life of Thomas Merton. Since both were attended by me back to back the same day, my mind was bothered to find a correlation between what appeared at first glance to be two incommensurable events randomly experienced side by side. The first connection came to the surface with the recollection of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s book of poems: ”The Coney Island of the Mind”. The title I subsequently learned was extracted from a book by Henry Miller; a rather superficial connection at face value of the Brooklynite Miller with the Brooklyn location of Coney Island and the theatrical performance taking place in Brooklyn. I mistakenly thought that the use of Miller’s phrase by Ferlinghetti embodied a positive correlation between his Miller’s consciousness and Coney Island, an embrace of the Barnum and Bailey aspect of the American experience: But the paragraph from which the phrase is taken, if read in full, showed Miller’s horror that our mind could be colonized by so much glitz and honky tonk. I had read a good deal of Miller in college and found his books a healthy romantic antidote to the hard nosed practicality of American academia and in particular the rank careerism of graduate school. Miller found a soulfullness in the squalor of Depression era Paris, which, somehow, was missing in the harsh workaday pragmatic culture of New York City. Ultimately, it was Miller’s European connection  that brought the play and Coney Island in some cognitive proximity. Thomas Merton’s father, an artist, had run away from America to France to pursue his artistic ambitions and it is where Merton grew up. I believe Merton’s conversion to Catholicism, was a return to Europe as a metaphysical realm. Miller was also after a transcendental meaning to his life that he found in sexuality: a private Eros to counteract the mass display of the erotic of Coney Island. Strangely enough “The Glory of the World” placed Merton’s inner spiritual life  under constant assault by the mass Dionysian impulse of our contemporary culture that was the essence of the old Coney Island.

WeeGee photo of ConeyIsland

Suddenly, I am at the seashore and no recollection of the train stopping. Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard -- a Coney Island of the mind. The amusement shacks are running full blast, the shelves full of chinaware and dolls stuffed with straw and alarm clocks and spittoons. Over it all, in a muffled roar, comes the steady hiss and boom of the breakers. Behind the pasteboard street front, the breakers are plowing up the night with luminous argent teeth. In the oceanic night, Steeplechase looks like a wintry beard.
Everything is sliding and crumbling. Everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters. Everything is a lie, a fake, pasteboard. Everything is made of nuts and bolts. The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench, sovereign pasteboard power.(Henry Miller)

In researching Miller I found a reference to his admiration for Spengler’s "Decline of the West". Spengler’s gloom and doom seems to hover around the periphery of his vision of Coney Island.

James Turrell

Last weekend on the occasion of the birthday of my daughter, who lives in the Berkshires, we went to Mass MoCA. My son who accompanied us wanted a space where his son could run around and be entertained.  My request to go to the Clark Institute would not have satisfied that requirement as its solemnity would have weighed too heavily on a rambunctious two year old. Indeed, it turned out to be a great place for a toddler,  a Coney Island of Contemporary arts.  Every show seemed to dissolve the space between the self and the masses who were spending their Sunday there.  Whether it is Turrell’s illuminated projections of Rothko or Nick Cave’s enormous installation of lawn ornaments the message is the same(although the hidden images of guns in Cave’s work attempt a deeper message of racial violence that couldn’t quite subvert  the carnival of colors): the trip to a museum no longer provides an opportunity for meditation on works that open up inner realms of meaning but one of entertainment where the subject(viewer) and the object(art) are mediated into the same space. The number and variety of things to see are hard to keep track of, which creates the mood of a three-ring circus. Now that Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus is gone, MoCA and the White House fill in the void.

Author with grandson in Rauschenberg installation

A small show of Rauschenberg’s painted phone booths(shower stalls or convention kiosks?) actually looked kind of mid-century kitsch that is all the rage in contemporary design, a Laurie Anderson show I missed as well as a quasi-permanent exhibition of Anselm Kiefer that I also missed. There was a totally clever but fatuous exhibition of someone who went out to meet and photograph all her “friends” on FB; a photographer's pseudo-deep analysis playing Facebook  media off of “face to face” media. What captured the essence of the dissolving of self and object was the collection of homemade instruments made by the late music professor at Bennington and his Students Gunnard Schonbeck. You could play them and somehow the cacophony of atonality and percussion created by random visitors playing the instruments resulted in a sort of avant-garde symphony. Unlike at the country fair there was no opportunity yet to make your own swirly painting. I find it interesting that much of the literature online written about the museum addresses attendance. The verdict is that the funky carney product does a good job of drawing the crowds.

 

Sarah Braman

The painting on show was more often painted sculpture but shown along side of straight painting so as to give the sense that the work transgressively could have gone either way from painting to sculpture or back again. One painting for example was made of corrugated metal that had arbitrary colors splashed on it. The metal’s nature, as being used in the physical world in construction yet being hung on the wall to be observed, had a deadening effect on this viewer, who wished to be transported by the painting but it repelled his gaze: A deadening of desire.  The deconstruction of painting somehow is ever resurrected as a valid pursuit with each new generation taking on the garb of the critical theory revolutionary. One piece, a long painted tunnel with its interior splashed with paint, was a painting outside/in. My grandson found it a lot of fun, but truth be told a tunnel of horrors at a carnival would be a more exciting experience.

Nick Cave

I can hear the critics, similar to those who left comments on my zombie formalism blog that I was just a fuddy-duddy, someone showing his age as the art world passes him by. The crowds seemed happy. I was especially happy at the brewpub strategically situated at the exit.

I had some hope for the future of painting when I received in the mail a self-published book by Paul Rodgers owner of the eponymous  gallery in Chelsea.  It is entitled “The Modern Aesthetic “. A visit to his exhibits of Marioni and Hantai in  Chelsea always provided a sympathetic respite from the contemporary scene and its grotesqueries. The book manifests how deeply he has thought about the role of painting in the contemporary scene and is ambitious ,to say the least, in its delineation of a path for Modernism starting with Gericault and ending with Hantai, with Courbet, Manet,  Newman, Rothko and Pollock along for the ride. He does a good job contextualizing the aforementioned artists into their navigation of the increasingly socialized power structures that dictate what can and cannot be experienced by the populace. The artist from Rodgers’ point of view is always in an adversarial stance in relation to society. Rodgers’ bias is toward the French manifestation of Modernism, which gained energy by challenging the rigid political structure of the French State. His commentary on Gericault’s “The Charging Chasseur” describes an artist attempting to isolate the experience of war in terms of the individual not of the group following the ideology of the leader: the raw terror of the horse and soldier in the midst of battle. His experience is defined by the role he has to play in battle but as something personally suffered. “The Raft of the Medusa” tells the same story of a group of individuals each in their own way dealing with the card that fate has handed them, probably led on some fantastical voyage by an ideological Ahab.

Courbet achieves the same goal of self-assertion of the private experience in challenging the structure of the Bourgeoisie, whether in “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” where he insists on his importance as a citizen or the magic of the countryside of his native land, which he claims as his terrain, his source emotionally, as much an origin as his famous, “The Origin of the World”.

Manet paints the public events where the rich and powerful  signaled their importance but turns these media events on their head to reveal that what is really going on socially is the buying and selling of flesh. This is something I commented on in the work of John Singer Sargent. The signaling of power and social rank was achieved by feigning the clothing and demeanor of social positions taken from the aristocracy prior to the modern era but in Sargent’s case they are not critiqued. I am not convinced that  Manet leads to Pollock, Newman, Rothko or Hantai but rather Warhol who is the artist of a ruling class already mediated by mass media.

Rodgers describes the triumvirate of Pollock, Rothko and Newman, as being in  rebellion against the status quo achieved by a turn inward toward the metaphysical ,which is attained in the case of Pollock via psychoanalysis. The origins of that metaphysical turn are, he believes, situated in Baudelaire’s description of a modern self, angst ridden and alone shorn of the spiritual depths of religion. He goes to great lengths to belittle Baudelaire’s admiration for Delacroix which is a grave mistake as the link from the 19thc to his 20thc artists is probably Delacroix not the poet Baudelaire who could paint in a realist style with political subject matter as in “Liberty Leading the People" but also in a more moody metaphysical style as in "The Death of Sardanapalus" .  It is an embodiment of the mood of boredom(l’ennui) so important to Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal”. A later work “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”,  has an existential theme of decision that anticipates the angst ridden work of Abstract Expressionism. I would love to know what Rothko with his Jewish roots thought of this painting and Delacroix in general.

 

Delacroix "The Death of Sardanapalus"

Rodgers makes claims about the essentialist structure of Newman’s work. There is the accompanying contrasting to Mondrian whose work is correctly described as based more in a positivist scientific tradition where abstraction evolves out of observation of the real world. Like so much abstraction it has its sources in Husserl’s eidetic reductions where visual structures are isolated as they are experienced in the brain. This has lead to the kind of cognitive science ,where for example our notions of being vertical beings are shaped by a part of the brain dedicated to verticality or uprightness. Newman’s use of the vertical is not some essence existing beyond Plato’s cave in the empyrean. I think that it is just this connection with the eye/mind that makes Newman’s work such a powerful presence when experienced in a gallery. The lines on the canvas line up with the inner lines of our consciousness.

The long and winding road of Modernism culminates in the work of Hantai. I admit I was only vaguely cognizant of his work, so I had to take the gallerist’s words on Hantai’s process of painting as true and accurate.  The picture Rodgers paints of Hantai leads me to believe that Hantai’s painting might be seminal of much of late 20thc and early 21st century painting if there can be proved an influence on Ellsworth Kelley. Rodgers’ case of Pollock’s influence on Hantai is based on the notion that the physical relationship of Pollock to his canvas changes when he puts the canvas on the floor and places himself above it. Hantai then puts himself in the painting by folding up the canvas and painting on top of the folded work, which is subsequently unfolded and hung on the wall. This manipulation of the ground seems to be his goal. No figure; just ground. Or then ground becoming figure. This undoing of the ground as support for the image is pursued in Kelly’s late plywood work without color, abandoning the last remnant of color optics.

Also a case could be made that the overall patterns of the Tabula series where figure and ground disappear in the grid-like structure of the work anticipate Richter’s overall squeegee work, which abandons figure/ground and any remnant of parts/whole.

Hantai

 

Paul de Man the notorious deconstructionist liked to point out how thinkers in the course of an essay will end up making points that support a view opposite to what they intended. This seems to be the case in part in the “Modern Aesthetic”. Hegel is presented on several occasions as the “bête-noire” of Rodgers’ central artists. He represents everything that Rodgers’ heroes struggle against. They are anti-Hegelians influenced by Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. Either overtly or by glorifying the private self, they struggle over against the State or status quo. I think that this premise works well for most of the artists except, oddly enough, it fails to capture Hantai’s aesthetic. Hegel’s famous dictum that “All that is real is rational and all that is rational is real.” came to mind, when I read about the process of Hantai's work. Hegel’s thinking embeds the metaphysical in the physical. From a political point of view it is the foundation of the Hegelian dialectic where the individual achieves its individuality only as a part of the idea of the state. From a purely analytical view it dissolves the physicality of the world into pure idea. Is not Hantai doing that when he takes what would have been the ground of the painting, so that it no longer functions as physical support for the painting but is figure and ground at the same time. Is it pure materiality or pure idea? Nature as phusis or the metaphysical as “nothing” are squeezed out as possibilities for the painting as it folds and unfolds itself into pure idea/materiality. There is thus nothing that is un-thought, or "let be"(gelassenheit) two concepts very important to Heidegger in his attempt to create a new metaphysics.  It would be pure physicality save for the grid but the grid is a” weak” thought as popularized by Vatimmo.  Could Hantai also be the precursor of provisional painting?

P.S.

My take on the creation of the Modernist Aesthetic focuses on the exploration of visual cognition.Or zen might allow for the unthought to take hold