Addison Parks at Prince St.New York, NY Tuesday, July 8 to Saturday, July 26, 2014

Addison used this email post unedited for his show with Joyce Crieger in Boston in 2000. 14 years ago! It is still valid in  regards to his work at The Prince St Gallery in New York, except that the organic forms are placed on abstract shapes.It was the other way around back then.Issues of time and event are still apropos. I wonder if my use of the word provisional in the sixth line can contribute to the ongoing discussion of provisional painting.

Green Thumb 2014

What intrigues me about your work is the evocation of the passage of time. Every painting seems to be a resolution of sorts of some conflict or tension that predates the painting and creates the stage for it. It comes together in the moment. Like a winning shot in a basketball game. It has this provisional quality to it e.g. you have tied the series but still have to win it. But that moment of the shot, a three pointer, is what the painting is about. And for the time being there is a sense of relief(resolution). Hidden underneath is what leads up to that moment. What is between the lines is the past and the thick rich gesture of the lines is that shot that won the game. 

The white on white(blue on blue) the loss of the disparity between ground and line in the newer work seems to point to the importance of every moment. The final shot won the game but everything in the past was of importance. It about "being there". Presence always. And the will behind it. It seems to be influenced by minimalism but without the arrogance, the absolute certainty of say Ellsworth Kelly(also there is a timelessness in Kelly). In your work there is coming and going, coming into being and passing away of each moment. 

Your painting is not "about" anything. Which I think you are happy to hear. It is not descriptive. Nor are you trying to express your emotions. What does that leave? The structure of lines and spaces in between sets the stage for a conscious/unconscious dichotomy. 

Sort of like what is on the surface of the water that comes from above(conscious) and the hints of the hidden from below(unconscious). I think your work is about attention. Attending to what rises to the surface at any given moment. Maybe the lines represent your conscious attempt to "be there" and the spaces are what is inevitability left out. Or cannot be comprehended. The play between what appears and what disappears or retreats whenever you try to pin it down. It is still the "time" thing because there is a recall of marks, gestures from the past which are changed in the present . 

And new shapes that grow out of the past. Also each painting happens at a certain point in time and therefore cannot be the same as what came before and what comes after. In sum, it is not spectatorial, like you are looking at anything that becomes an object for your subject, nor is it about self expression. Like you were screaming about something. It is very silent. It is about moments in the flux of time where you attend to a play between seen and unseen. Maybe that is where the game metaphor from the last message comes in. 

It strikes me that in my discussion about your work up until now I had left out the issue of color. I focused on the structure and gesture and what it meant, but color ... 

When I first saw your work I was touched by the color mood, the overall affect of each painting. It was something you could swim in. It was totalizing but not dictatorial as though the different colors enjoyed being together, they liked rubbing shoulders with each other. Some sort of crazy cocktail party. You walk in and say wow this is quite a party and after it’s over you are ready for the next. You've invited lots of guests. Which can translate into influences and how you let them play out in your work. 

Hence the issue of time: these influences unfold in time and so do you and each time you dip into the stream it is different. You can find new guests showing up.  It's not a socialites ball with only pedigree guests. None of this hitting the viewer over the head over a lifetime with the same image of me me me . 

I remember being bugged by this zen monastery I went to because it seemed over orchestrated. One exquisite zen moment after the next. Too perfect. Your work has chaotic moments, messy, just for a moment. Then whoosh...the basket goes in.

(October 3 - 28, 2000; Creiger-Dane Gallery, Boston)

MARTIN MUGAR , August 2000

Impossiblity of transcendence in American Art

I remember an artist, who had recently lost his wife to cancer,  telling me of his inquiry into what various religions had to say about the afterlife. All I remember is what he had to say about the Mormons, for whom heaven is just like the world we live in on earth,  just permanent.When you die, you will be greeted by all your dead kin and I assume go on pretty much as you did here, but, forever, as one big happy family. Such a belief doesn't make the real inferior to the ideal, but in a strangely counter-intuitive fashion reinforces the validity of the here and now. It is as though the higher realm of heaven gives its divine seal of approval to life on earth. I wonder if this belief is quintessentially American. I read recently in the diary of Bataille, where he described the arrival of the American soldiers in Paris at the end of WW11, and how with their swagger seemed to epitomize a certain immanence of the ideal in the real. Americans don't struggle to transcend the real but are masters of manipulating it and reinforcing it. It explains the predominance of Pragmatism in American philosophy.There are problems to be solved and social injustices to be abolished. Pragmatism  dominates the airways: on cable TV with their shows on loggers,truckers, fisherman. There is no time for meditating on the meaning of the universe when you got a lien on your equipment and have to produce to make the payments. The strangeness of existence, the why and wherefore of our individual life is not an issue, except as raw survival.  I think the sitcoms we see today and those of the past show American Families shoehorned into a kind of eternal present and through the magic of film are eternally young in the endless reruns,(is that the Mormon heaven on earth?) until you see somewhere that the actors have died of drug overdoses or god forbid die of old age.Whether the family is traditional or not,  the story is the same old notion of trying to get along despite one's differences.

Richard Rorty, an American Pragmatist philosopher, is sympathetic to deep thinkers who problematize everything as long as they don't get in the way of the liberal agenda of according  more and more rights to more and more social subsets. We have to be above all good citizens. Strange thoughts of our origins and destinies are to be kept to yourselves. He sees them as intriguing mental exercises, which when applied to society, result in the violence of German and Japanese politics between and during the two World Wars. The Nazi's fell under the spell of Nietzsche and the Overman and the Japanese fell under the spell of Zen. On the one hand you had the will to power and on the other the will to nothingness. On the one hand you had the Holocaust, on the other Kamakazi pilots. A nuanced study of Nietzsche's thought and Zen Buddhism find that both belief systems can be interpreted to be heuristic attempts to control excesses of self-assertion, that Nietzsche thought the German's prone to, and infatuation with the void, which Zen tries to disabuse its adherents of. Because they put the region of that struggle within the individual's consciousness and not in the self as part of a community, makes them susceptible to thymotic excess. No more drama of the saints trying to be at one with God. No more struggles with right or wrong within the soul; the battles are all societal. Heidegger deconstructs consciousness as too wrapped up in Christian theology and wants through Dasein to place it back in the world. Our sitcoms do the same as they disabuse us of any notion of individual superiority to the group.The dads are all either castrated clodhoppers or bigoted buffoons.

I have been reading a book by Malcolm Bull. Never heard of him until I stumbled across his book on Nietzsche at Barnes and Noble. Browsing in bookstores will soon be a thing of the past,alas!!
He seems to be a student of Deleuze and  contemporary social theory. He quotes on several occasions  Kojeve, the famous interpreter of Hegel, who was responsible for introducing Sartre to the work of Hegel and Heidegger, an enounter which generated Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". Kojeve sees humanity in the modern world as  resembling more and more a herd. Unlike Nietzsche, who was horrified by this process toward a mass culture, Kojeve embraced it as inevitable, beneficial and sees it as a sort of negative transcendence. We would now transcend our humanity by becoming more animal. Malcolm Bull says:"Becoming animal is becoming modern, perhaps as Kojeve suggests the future of modernity".  Kojeve imagines  this new humanity(if "human" would even apply any more to this new species)would "perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas." No more solo parts.No more tension between the hero and the chorus. Maybe we will all look like "Swamp People" who in the latest ad are made to resemble their prey.By the way, Kojeve is one of the fathers of the European Common Market.

Not a very pretty picture:the Mormon happy family as sclerosis of the ideal in the real and on the other hand an animalization of the race which is masked as humanism. All that science does with its logos is to provide a rationale for this herding of the species.It makes it more reasonable.

see my essay on Heide Hatry