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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| "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.
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| 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
Martin Mugar
