Busa,Paglia,Theosophy and Peggy Lee

From"Knowledge of Higher Worlds"by Rudolf Steiner (influenced Joseph Beuys)

Chris Busa, in responding on Facebook to the issues brought up in my article on Jed Perl’s new collection of essays “Magicians and Charlatans”, drew a parallel between Perl’s disenchantment with the current art scene and that of Camille Paglia’s. He referenced an article she wrote for the “Wall Street Journal”, which made the odd claim that art would do well to look to capitalism to refresh its roots, which she feels have always been capitalistic. Odd on the face of it as you would be hard put to find any artist of the 20thc who espoused the tenets of capitalism; all claimed to be left-wing in their political allegiance. However, when you think of the disruptive effect of say Cubism and Abstract Expressionism on the visual language of Western Art, with which we shape our world and our feelings, it has a lot in common with Schumpeter’s vision of Capitalism as “creative destruction”: as perennially disruptive of any sort of status quo. What is truly odd is that the Left in its embrace of Communism ignored that, as an economic system, Communism is most susceptible to rigid social control; the very things that the Avant-garde in art has always disdained. Much has been written about how slow it was for the Left to realize the horrors of the Stalinist regime, which loved humanity in theory but not in practice. Moreover, the money to purchase the Avant-garde’s work came rarely from the state but more likely from capitalists who felt their business acumen also applied to picking the art of the future. And when it does come from the state, it tends toward the reactionary. Is Paglia right? Is this the elephant in the room that no one wants to admit to: the avant-garde, despite its protestations, has a lot in common with the capitalist system?

The art of today is more interested in describing the notion of universal victimhood experienced by certain groups due to their perceived oppression by the Capitalist establishment. I remember my last days of academic teaching saw the marginalization of the traditional language of painting by the study of oppression due to gender bias or that perpetrated by a consumerist culture’s push toward commodification. It was anti-capitalistic in so far as capitalism is a synonym for patriarchal control. The teaching of a seemingly value neutral course on seeing and perception was construed to be patriarchal, partaking of the controlling gaze of the dominant male. Much of what passes for art education is probably a repackaging of the ideas prevalent in the thirties during the Great Depression when Capitalism was seen as bankrupt and incapable of advancing the well being of the masses. Stalinist Russia appeared to be the solution to the woes of the workers of the world. The art that grew out of that sympathy for the masses was Social Realist and the artists in this country best known for their politicization were Ben Shahn and Thomas Hart Benton. They pursued  neither technical nor spiritual exploration. It was stylistically derivative of other forms of realism. The difference is that then the battles they described took place in the street; today they take place in the classroom.

I still recall the words of William Bailey: In the Forties, when the Social Realists dominated the art scene, you would never have imagined the Fifties would be dominated by the likes of de Kooning, Gorky and Pollock. During the Thirties and Forties they were developing their art under the radar; it was an art rooted in technical experimentation of the visual language of  Cubism and Surrealism, which provided a vehicle for spiritual notions of the self. When it finally burst on the scene it transformed not only art but also the dynamics of the individual and society.

The youth of today, according to Paglia, are indoctrinated in the tenets of the Left; from kindergarten on we are taught to be political animals. Our identity comes solely from our function in the social fabric. Our success always comes at the expense of someone else's’ loss.  It is a zero sum game. Capitalism is disruptive of an individual’s clear identity within this structure, since it fosters the movement of money and privilege to those who are most successful at making money i.e. the most innovative and hard working or to those who inherited it and invested it well. Viewed from the point of view of the masses they achieved their riches through exploitation of the less fortunate. The struggle, if you want to call it that, of the individual in our society is to appear to be no better than anyone else. It could be seen as the application of religious piety to the social structure. There is always something ex nihilo in the capitalist enterprise, the introduction of something totally unexpected and transformational. So instead of a push and pull between social norms and the self, it is the social norms that come first and last.

Paglia makes one comment in her essay about the spiritual hollowness of Contemporary Art; I believe this is the direction she should be pursuing if she wants to diagnose accuratly the malaise of the modern scene.

“Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.”

This is a strange jump from praise for capitalism to that of religion. Moreover, religion and capitalism are often antithetical in their ends. Christianity has always been the standard bearer of the oppressed. So how can she conflate the two?The religion of Mondrian and Pollock was not the religion of the Sunday worshipers of the fifties and sixties. It was hermetic and counter cultural. It was in its essence elitist.

Religion was rejected by Marx as the opiate of the ignorant masses. But the core of his ideas is best seen as a sort of social piety without the higher metaphysical realm. He posited that we couldn’t escape our identity in terms of our status within the class structure. Ignorance of this condition is a kind of state of sin that is referred to by Marxists as “false consciousness”. These egalitarian ideas that go back to Rousseau have bedeviled many a revolution and society as a whole. How far do you have to go to inculcate the sense of social awareness? Today the left finds fault with even the American Revolution as having its origin in the rich bourgeois slave owners and thus not reflecting the needs of those left out of the Social Contract. The French Revolution, the Bourgeoisie’s revolt against the aristocracy,  tried to extend the ideas of egalitarianism to all levels of society with increasing violence. According to the insightful book about the history of egalitarianism by MalcolmBull, ”Anti-Nietzsche”, there were several political thinkers in 18thc France who thought of ingenious ways of leveling society so that no accumulation of capital would allow any one group to distinguish itself from another. Quoting Simone Weill as well as Nietzsche, he perceives these thoughts to be dominated by gravity. Their tendency is to pull everything down to the same level. What happens to the transcendent values? As the limbo song says: how low can you go? It is a sort of anti-transcendence, where to be truly human is to become more animal and by animal they mean to accept being part of a herd.In the end Bull identifies with this leveling out.

  

Besant and Ledbetter:"Music of Gounod"from "Thought Forms"

Besant and Ledbetter "Vague Religious Feeling"

Much has been written about the influence of Theosophy, which was developed by Besant and Blavatsky in the late 19th and early 20thc, on the founders and the development of Modern art. The book “Thought Forms” written in 1901 by Besant and Ledbetter was read by Kandinsky and Mondrian and foreshadowed much of what came to be Modern Art. Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy and a major influence on Joseph Beuys, was originally a theosophist. Art is central to his religion and lives on in the Waldorf Schools that he founded. “Thought Forms” is full of non- representational images of various colors that evoke different states of spirituality or lack thereof. Their view of mankind is very hierarchal and spiritual in its insistence that we must transcend our human condition through the inclusion of divine forces beyond us. The last time such an approach influenced art was in the early Renaissance paintings of Botticelli and Piero. Botticelli’s “Venus” was a spiritual talisman used by Cosimo de Medici to counteract his melancholy, due to the excessive influence of Saturn. Piero de la Francesca’s work was built out of numerological and harmonic properties, which would allow it to resonate with forces beyond the sub lunar realm, which would only lead to decay and death. It is rather exciting to think that the aesthetic beauty of Botticelli’s “Primavera” emanates from energy beyond the painting. In our time, after Mondrian and Kandinsky, the Abstract Expressionists engaged spiritual ideas, in particular Pollock, whose work is truly transcendent .He underwent Jungian analysis, a psychological/quasi-religious system that sees the individual as part of the collective unconscious. Rothko wanted his work to be seen as tragedic engagement in a spiritual struggle. He bemoaned his inclusion in a kind of analytical abstraction that was scientific in its origins.

Besant and Ledbetter influenced Kandinsky

from"Knowledge of Higher Worlds"Rudolf Steiner.

Boghosian"Within the Iris"

It was serendipitous that in writing this piece, some clearing out of old magazines, brought to my attention the 2009/10 issue of  “Provincetown Arts” which features a cover article on the work of Varujan Boghosian, subtitled “The artist as Orpheus” written by none other than Chris Busa. The picture painted of Boghosian places him in a more ancient tradition than the obvious influences of Cornell and the Surrealists. Some critics understand another Armenian, Gorky, as drawing on ancestral roots that go beyond the influence of his contemporaries, or, more precisely, to remind these contemporary epigones that they are merely a recrudescence of ancient traditions thought to have been purged from the contemporary scientific realm. Varujan is artist as magician. The bringing together of disparate objects generates a mood or energy that casts the viewer into a trance or reverie. He is Prospero, a magician like Orpheus who as Busa says could cause animals to stop grazing or the trees to sway. His works are incantations that a magician like Yeats might chant in “Wandering Angus”, who “plucks till time and times are done, the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun” a combination of words that always throws me into a perplexed state of mind.

Is there any room for the magician in our modern culture? In an essay I wrote on “Berkshire Fine Arts” on the occasion of a show of Lester Johnson’s work at the Acme Gallery in Boston, I described the current art scene as made up of the same exhibition spread out over thousands of galleries world wide: a found object on the floor, photos on the wall and a manifesto about groups that have not benefited from recognition by society. The ultimate routinization of Duchamp’s charisma. The work is of such predictability that I am bewildered that the name of Duchamp is at all evoked as an inspiration.

I suspect that the culprit behind this state of the current art scene can be found in the triumph of science as an ultimate tool that can control nature. On the one hand it can be disruptive of norms but its overall goal is toward routiniization so as to make everything risk free. I always marvel at the expansion of the office mentality in Microsoft Works. It is a wonder of pure efficiency and order. No longer do we sit dumbly in front of a TV but now in front of the computer screen which creates a false sense of community via facegook and a false sense of order when Bill Gates auto corrects my horrible typing.

The sorcerer with his wand or baton could bring the world to a halt, calm the waters and bring peace between animals and mankind. Today Harmony can be engineered or legislated.

The magus’s rarity is implied in the title of Jed Perl’s latest book. “Magicians and Charlatans”. He does a good job of nailing the charlatans but for the life of me except for the usual characters of Picasso and Matisse, I can’t find any true magicians in these essays.

Steiner's Goetheanum 1924-1928 influenced Le Corbusier

I recall Rudolph Steiner’s observation that the highest level  of materiality in Western Civilization came around the time of Christ’s birth. He pointed to the extreme level to which the individual social persona was pushed as evinced in the amazing detail present in portrait busts of the time. In law he observed the development  of wills and deeds, which allowed these personalities to control the material goods they accumulated during this life from the grave. According to Steiner, Christ's birth had the cosmic purpose of pulling mankind up from the material abyss. Are we in a similar spot historically?. Never has human control over the natural elements been so complete? The message of the Gospel spoke of other realms that each individual must struggle with if they are to be truly human. Today we no longer even hear the howl of Allen Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters looking for the ancient heavenly connection” but the braying of the compliant beasts looking to be at one with the herd.

William Irwin Thompson, the culture critic, thinks that the explosion of interest in spirituality in the 60’s and 70’s was comparable to the American Indians of the 19thc who, in order to empower themselves in their battle against the Europeans, underwent self mortification in delirious “ghost dances”. It was a burst of spirituality in the face of Western rationality, a glorious sunset to be followed by the dark night of reason. Are we finally going trough an absolute extirpation of the spiritual type, has it become irrelevant? The question to be asked is Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is?”

In the art schools of today, in the galleries it has been answered. An emphatic Yes: That is all there is.

Today, the PC cops will not even let you “break out the booze.” Or as they say in France to all references to alcohol: Drink with moderation.

Here is a more recent and grimmer version of the essay on Pollaro and Mugar

Mugar

Pollaro

                           Mugar and Pollaro at the Bromfield opening Feb 1,2013

Why the pairing of Martin Mugar and Paul Pollaro’s paintings? The obvious difference binds them together as artists in the tradition of Western Painting: Mugar loves color and Pollaro value. Mugar’s color hints at an overall value and Pollaro’s values suggest colors. This focus puts their interest in light as revealed through color and value from the Greeks to its dissolution in Kelly, Richter and Ryman. These three linger at the endgame of a long tradition of optics and seeing as the ground of painting. One foot in the tradition and the other where? They still tempt you to look with remnants of the language of light but imply that there is nothing to see if not the space between and around the paintings or just the paint as paint, which is not pointing the viewer anywhere beyond the canvas. In the end Kelly just puts up a plywood board, the substrate and abandons the color, his last link to the tradition of seeing. Richter stays with the paint as paint and the human presence still allowed with nothing more than a perfunctory smear. Ryman’s limitation of value to barely perceived shifts lingers longest with paint as seeing.

Pollaro’s and Mugar’s art references paint’s physical reality on the canvas and puts them more in the company of these artists that bookend the history of painting than the abstract painters who precede them such as Mondrian and the Color Field Painters. Mondrian supplied the ground upon which was built a full century of abstract painting. It was an intellectual ground of proportions and harmonies organized into clear wholes constructed out of distinct parts, sharp edges. Ryman, Kelly, Richter, artists of their time, take apart this language by casting doubt on our belief in the illusion of painting itself. If Mondrian moves beyond painting as an illusion of the real then these artists deconstruct painting as the illusion of a metaphysical reality. Everything in the painting can only point to itself and the message is the self -effacement, the wiping away of paint that might vibrate with something beyond itself.

These three artists attract Pollaro and Mugar due to their relentless cutting of ground from under one’s feet. Maybe they see more clearly the grim nihilism embodied in the work of Ryman, Kelly and Richter than the artists themselves do. For the grad school ingénue these artists provide an easy way to produce market ready product but for Mugar and Pollaro they challenge any easy notion of visual meaning. They seem to relish the site of painting’s demise as a sort of challenge to their creative drive to resurrect painting. Both Pollaro and Mugar seem to ask: is this end of painting to be constantly reiterated?  Is it the contemporary artist’s only role as spelled out in the academies and the galleries to constantly hammer nail after nail in the coffin of painting?

Their notion of a ground and support goes beyond the canvas or board supporting the paint and becomes a metaphysical ground hidden beneath the visual. It is a harshly altered notion of the visual on the canvas. For both these artists their inspiration for ground does not come from some lofty notion of a higher world but from the world they move around in. The surface of paint does not just refer to itself but is the crust where the hidden becomes visual, but almost simultaneously withdraws. It is a rather precarious zone where meaning no sooner gained is lost.

Pollaro’s notion of ground is mud, embodying a murky primordial earth, beneath the surface of visuality, from which the Buddhists knew the lotus drew its strength. Like some miner he leaves the sunlit surface of the earth to look in the sunless earth for veins of ore that glow of their own accord. His work seems to have its locus in sites of volcanic activity where earth is formed or consumed. The work is self -referential in that the object is the subject: it is made with tar that looks like mud. But the journey he follows as he manipulates the tar becomes a strange amalgam that speaks of certain special and sensual qualities: from limitlessness to the armor of a giant crocodile. To quote again the Buddhists: it is not the finger that is pointing at the moon that we should look at but the moon itself. But what is he really pointing at? Pointing at himself. Maybe not much more than the grim stoicism of the toiler of the land knee deep in the field unsure of the payback of his efforts.

Mugar has set sail on a sea whose flickering surface is the interface of the sunlit world and the swelling body of the ocean’s restless flux. This is not a world of people and things, of sunlit porches and verandas looking out on the world. Nor the distinct forms of abstract rationalism. The individual units of the painting are an impulse themselves as the flat units of Mondrian are questioned as a basis for painting. But what if all this repetition of marks no matter how well crafted hints only at a grim monotony that all the color cannot belie: the repetition of waves ad infinitum that reveal nothing or only serve to hide the truth.

Pollaro and Mugar wrest technical deconstruction from Ryman, Kelly and Richter to expand the vocabulary to let painting say something about the seen and the unseen. It is an unseen that is always present in the day to day, as close as one’s body that surprises us when we look out at our hand that reaches out to the world. Everything hovers between sense and non-sense, understandable as a clear summer day at sea but escaping clarity when swells suddenly manifest themselves as waves and engulf the sailor. The toiler in the earth despite a lifetime of assiduous toil knows that one day he will be part of that soil. There are no claims here to having accomplished some heroic meaning in the face of the void.

(link here to 2015 show essay with Mugar Pollaro et alia)

Mugar and Pollaro at the Bromfield, Boston Jan 30-Feb 23

                             

Why the pairing of Martin Mugar and Paul Pollaro’s paintings? The obvious difference binds them together as artists in the tradition of Western Painting: Mugar loves color and Pollaro value. Mugar’s color hints at an overall value and Pollaro’s values suggest colors. This focus puts their interest in light as revealed through color and value from the Greeks to its dissolution in Stella, Kelly, Richter and Ryman. These four linger at the endgame of a long tradition of optics and seeing as the ground of painting. One foot in the tradition and the other where? They still tempt you to look with remnants of the language of light but imply that there is nothing to see if not the space between and around the paintings or just the paint as paint, which is not pointing the viewer to anywhere beyond the canvas. In the end Kelly just puts up a plywood board, the substrate and abandons the color, his last link to the tradition of seeing. Richter stays with the paint but it is paint as paint and the human presence still allowed with nothing more than a perfunctory smear. Ryman’s limitation of value to barely perceived shifts lingers longest with the use of  paint in the tradition. Stella is the only one of the group to overcome his minimalism of the late 50’s with his misinterpretation of Caravaggio that results in a garish maximalism. He would have been better off staying put and lingering at the site of paintings demise. In any case the zeitgeist of the last quarter of the 20^th century was one of deconstruction of big metaphysical concepts and Stella was too much of a builder. So we will remove him from this group.

 20^th c painting owes its trajectory to Mondrian. If any one artist supplied the ground upon which to build a full century of abstract painting it was Piet. It was an intellectual ground of proportions and harmonies. The lines of measurement and pure color spread out into the culture as a whole and defined architecture and interior design for at least 50 years from its inception. A theosophist, he imagined that he was bringing to the surface hidden harmonies. In the end he was a rationalist that establsihed the language for the scientific culture of the 20^th century painting, constructed out of distinct parts, sharp edges and organized into clear wholes. Ryman, Kelly, Richter, artists of their time, take apart this language by casting doubt on our belief in the illusion of painting itself. If Mondrian had killed painting as illusion of the real then these artists killed painting as the illusion of a metaphysical reality.Everything in the painting can only point to itself and the message is the self-effacement, the wiping away of a painting that might vibrate with something beyond itself.

Their self-consciousness that keeps referring back to paint’s physical reality on the canvas puts Pollaro and Mugar in the company of these artists that bookend the history of painting. However, both seem to ask: is this ending of painting to be constantly reiterated? Is it the contemporary artist’s only role as spelled out in the academies and the galleries to constantly hammer nail after nail in the coffin of painting? What if painting points to something beyond an artist’s intentions to play their role as stern-eyed dispassionate contemporary painters? What if their notion of a ground and support went beyond the canvas or board supporting the paint and became a metaphysical ground, which is hidden from the visual, but, which a harshly altered notion of the visual could point to? For both these artists their inspiration for ground does not come from some cerebral notion of a higher world but from the world they move around in.

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Pollaro’s ground is the underground. There is in his painting a grim stoicism of someone who works on the land, knee deep in the soil. The return on one's labor is slow and the earth unforgiving. Or like some miner he leaves the sunlit surface of the earth to explore the sunless earth for veins of ore that glow of their own accord. His work has its locus it seems in sites of volcanic activity where earth is formed or consumed. His use of tar embodies it.

Mugar has set sail on a sea, whose flickering surface is the interface of the sunlit world and the swelling body of the ocean’s restless flux. This is not a world of people and things, of sunlit porches and verandas looking out on the world. Nor the distinct forms of abstract rationalism. The individual units of the painting are an impulse themselves as though the flat units of Mondrian are questioned as a basis for painting. The very building block of the painting is "physis" itself.

 If Mondrian brought the light that had defined the real for centuries into the flat patterns of modern rationalism, and Ryman, Kelly and Richter deconstruct that notion of painting into its physical parts, Mugar and Pollaro forge a new path for painting if not reinstating its original one, to let painting say something about the seen and the unseen and to marvel at the sheer beauty of our life on this planet!

http://www.bromfieldgallery.com/exhibitions.html

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"

Thinking back on more than twenty years of art criticism by Jed Perl on the occasion of the publication of his most recent collection of essays by the Eakins Press Foundation

 Phil Press, fellow Boston artist and founder of Cambridge Adult Ed's Studio School, first introduced me to Jed Perl and his writing in the early 90’s. They had met as young painters at Skowhegan in the early 70’s and remained in contact during the intervening years. Occasionally, Phil would invite Jed to Cambridge to lecture to his students on some topic related to the New York art scene. I would always make a point of attending these talks, as his insights into the vacuity and hype of whatever scene was current, were an inspiration to persevere in my solitary struggle to make paint and painting a vital language of self-expression.

We are all three products of the figurative revival of the late sixties and early 70’s that gave credence to the language of painting from observation, a method that had been brutally sidelined by Abstraction, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Pop Art. Phil had studied at the Studio School in New York City, which was a stopping off place for many painters who wanted to work in a representational visual language, when it was hard to find such instruction elsewhere in the academic world. Phil went on to get his MFA at Queens where Louis Finkelstein, a luminary of the figurative movement taught . Phil seems to think that Jed studied painting for a while at Brooklyn College, where Philip Pearlstein and Gabriel Laderman were instructors. Laderman was known as much for his polemics on behalf of figuration as for his painting. I studied at Yale, whose identity as a center of the avant-garde was tempered by the arrival of Bill Bailey, who succeeded in bringing in as visitng artists many of the above-mentioned artists of the figurative movement.

To understand Perl’s philosophical stance, that he has steadfastly held for more than twenty years, it is necessary to see his thinking as formed in the context of that figurative revival. For a moment and in retrospect a very brief moment there was the hope of an alternative direction for art, or at least that figuration could continue on a track parallel to the avant-garde. I have written elsewhere that figuration wanted to revive the particular experience of being in the here and now, in contradistinction to an art object totally Greenbergian: on the one hand with its obsession with absolute forms, and mediatized on the other with its need to place the individual in an absolute socially defined identity. I recall vividly wandering the museums and galleries of New York and Boston and feeling a deep sense of alienation from the minimalsim, the conceptual sculpture, the media based Warhols, all issuing from an extreme rational analysis of modern life. A language that jumped out of the physical space that our bodies moved in replaced the magic of  art that could make real and tactile the present. There was never the smell of grass, the wind in your face nor the vibrancy of the seasons. The paintings of Gretna Campbell or Stanley Lewis that Perl admired were  literally a breathe of fresh air. The human existential reality of being in the world had found a place to stand. For one brief moment the grey clouds of rationalism opened up to a vivid blue sky where the senses of the body pulsated.

Another key to understanding Jed Perl can be found in his admiration for the great critics and artists of early modernism. Confronted, with now several generations of American artists that see art as  providing a wonderful playground for experimentation with lifestyles, Jed, whose understanding of the tradition of Western Art allows him to talk intelligently about Chardin, Poussin and Vuillard sets up camp in the tradition of the art critics and shapers of early Modernism, such as Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro, Lincoln Kirstein, (all of whom are dedicated individual essays in the “Magicians and Charlatans”). When the Bourgeois world of the 19th c fell apart under the weight of science, there was in part a dancing on the grave of the past by the new guard but there was also the awareness that something had been lost as well as gained.The representational language that had held the real in its thrall for over 500 years had broken open, and that deconstruction liberated incredible energy. Perl sees that energy in Picasso’s semantizing of Cezanne in the “Les Demoiselles ‘d’Avignon” or in his appreciation of Edmund Wilson’s understanding of Stravinsky’s musical energy. These were makers and shapers (the title of his essay on Lincoln Kirstein) who would pick up the pieces like Eliot and Pound and make new realities. They knew and cherished the pieces of the past and ruefully accepted that the Europe they loved had suffered a catastrophe and like Humpty Dumpty no one could put the pieces back together again.  There still was the will to recreate a whole in the face of the wholesale destruction of the first World War. In the laissez-faire aesthetics of the contemporary art scene (the title of the introductory essay in this new collection of his essays) that is hell bent on chopping up bourgeois reality into smaller and smaller pieces, Perl sees no love of history. And when the past is referenced by contemporary figurative artist like Currin it is distorted to appear to be as ironic and cynical as their own work. It is brought down to their level.

I still have several photocopies of Perl’s essay from the October, 1992 issue of “The New Republic”, entitled ”The Art Nobody Knows” . It spells out the way in which the art scene, in its ever anxious need to promote the “new”, makes it impossible for those artists, who see art as a coherent language, deserving a lifetime of study, from having the air, space and money to pursue that goal. I would hand the article out to my painting students at the Art Institute of Boston in order to give them some perspective on where the tenets of my classroom came from and hopefully encouraging them to avoid being sucked into the latest fad at Yale and New York. The essay referenced the English artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as paragons of figuration. From a pedagogical point of view, they were valuable as stopping off points on the road from figuration to abstraction, which was the essential goal of my teaching experience. Unfortunately, few of my students, despite intelligence and talent, heeded Perl’s message. Their talent got them to Yale and to New York, but the human all to human need to belong to a status quo got the better of them, and they imprinted on whatever was then the current scene.

Many of the issues in the essays in “Magicians and Charlatans”, culled from his writing of the last decade, are already present in the essay I have from 1992:  The Whitney Biennials, commercialism, the art industry, the importance of the slow making of art over time, the need for patterns and form and the way the structure and culture of the New York scene make this slow growth impossible. His interests represent the effort of someone ,who cares not only about New York artists, but always tries to put his finger on the pulse of a larger meaning or zeitgeist in which they all participate. I recall a more recent essay that appeared in the “The New Republic” on the Cindy Sherman retrospective at t MOMA, that was sent to me by Mark Gottsegen, the author of the “Painters Handbook.” This one pulled out all the verbal weaponry and pearls of wisdom that he is capable of. It was a full-fledged frontal assault on Sherman, deconstructor of female myths mythologized in a major retrospective. After the smoke had cleared she still remained intact. Cindy as Perl points out is an industry supported by dealers, curators and collectors. When you unleash an assault on her you are only one person fighting an army.

The worlds of Rome and Bernini are so well fathomed as to appear as fresh and new as the early 20thc in New York, that he exquisitely depicts through essays on the writing of Meyer Schapiro, Edmund Wilson and Lincoln Kirstein. The contemporary scene of Oursler, Viola, Gober and Currin leave him for the most part without a label. Except for Gober they are dismissed as lacking the seriousness that he would like to see in their work but he does not dismiss them out of hand. He gives them their day, tries to understand why they have achieved their notoriety. Why this refusal to give them and others such as Yuskavage, Heilmann and Peytona a positive value? Those artists, who were reviewed in the earlier part of our new millennium are probably past their shelf life and for all I know aren’t even taken seriously today by even the hipster critics. I have to agree with Perl there is something missing. But what?

To shed some light on this, it is interesting to try to sift out Perl’s politics. I am sure he often gets backed into a corner where someone says: if you are so conservative in your tastes in art you must be right wing in your politics. He never hesitates to say he is for Obama or that Reagan destroyed the economy by cutting taxes, which in turn inflated the art market of the 80’s. In art he is an elitist but in politics he is an egalitarian. This distinction is current in some circles of New York Intelligentsia and was said of William A Henry 3rd’s book “In Defense of Elitism” in the early 90’s, that he bemoaned the weakening of the hierarchy of excellence over popular culture but was still egalitarian in his politics.  Maybe this is why Perl uses the economic expression laissez –faire culture (the title of the introductory essay of this collection) to point blame to the conflation of commerce and art culture, as seen in his attack on the multi-millionaire Eli Broad’s museum in LA, where the endower and the endowed see no separation of interest. The collector who purchases Jeff Koons gilded pop items then builds a museum/supermarket to promote his purchases.  Castelli is depicted as no more than a crass opportunist. The guilty parties are the capitalists, that need something to sell the public and choose art that pretends to challenge the commercial enterprise they are involved in.  I beg to differ: I think a different reading of history would point to egalitarianism as the cause of the vacuity in the art of today as much as unfettered capitalism.

I think what haunts Perl’s work is that the generation that came of age after the Abstract Expressionists, in particular, the boomers let themselves be defined by the media. It was a cultural narcissism in extremis, where the inner world becomes "colonized" by the outer world. But what if all these successions of styles and cultural moods only reflect a slow unraveling or winding down of the unmediated self. The Abstract Expressionists had found some latent strength in the systems of Jung and Freud to map out an inner landscape. There were drives to be defined that could push out against the world and psyches rooted in a collective consciousness that would surprise us about our true selves. These systems were a modern religion for those who were no longer capable or willing to embrace traditional religion.They created a map of an inner life that has  been replaced by several generations now that are medicated and mediated on all levels. If the inner and outer are the same, can we even talk about the self.The hipsters don't care.

”Postcards from Nowhere” points out that the art collectors and the artist are on the same page. This state of things could be seen as the result of the loss of a mandarin class, of an elite that could differentiate the good and the bad, but it must follow that this demise of an intellectual aristocracy will end in an egalitarianism that validates any and every attempt of the masses at self- expressions. I think the modern art scene is the result of "here comes everybody". The skill necessary for painting is abandoned for installation that appeals to the practical craft of the ordinary citizen as renovator of her own space. Painting was always based on the metaphysical power of the artist’s gaze to take their momentary observation and turn it into the eternal moment. Marxist critics felt that stability came from having money to buy the time to stop the visual clock and impose their vision on the world. Now that the metaphysical base has been undercut, there is no direct contact between man and nature, man and the cosmos that one finds in Cezanne and Van Gogh or the raw imposition of the Freudian id on form that you find in Picasso or Pollock. Warhol, our John Singer Sargent, best embodies this shift of private consciousness to a totally mediated self. Now the parts are reduced to miniscule grains that are too small to piece together. To quote Nietzsche:

“Are we not well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small soft round, unending sand.” The ability to put things back together has long past? The reduction ad infinitum has become a reduction ad absurdum/. Perl is the chronicler of this never-ending train wreck.


I find it telling that the frontispiece of “Magicians and Charlatans” is dedicated to Leon (presumably Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of “The New Republic”) with a quote from Po Chu-i (a Tang poet):

To Leon:

"Till day broke we sat in the moon’s clear light
 Laughing and singing, and yet never grew tired.
 In Ch’ing-an, the place of profit and fame,
 Such moods as this, how many men know?"

If Po chu-i, who was exiled for having violated Confucian precepts in his role as an assistant to the Emperor, had been born during the Maoist cultural revolution, such private moods would have made him a candidate for a good rinse of brainwashing. What Perl could explore more thoroughly is that the Marxist notion of how the bourgeoisie suffers from “false consciousness” has so permeated our culture that, although we don’t send our artists off to a gulag for not toeing the party line, there is a shunning that is prevalent in academia for those who are not always current in their tastes. The real heroes for Perl are those artists that didn’t win the jackpot. Whether they rose to the stature of those artists like Matisse that they emulated is not the issue as Updike and Plagens insist it is in their reading of Perl. Artists such as Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, and Stanley Lewis embody and embodied a tradition of artists, who understood painting as being as subtle and structured as the language we speak. You can’t judge them badly for not rising to the same level as their predecessors. They thought it more valuable to codify the magic of the language of seeing and like the monks of Ireland in the Dark Ages, who preserved the wisdom of Greek and Latin culture in their codexes, to save it from the barbaric hordes.The invasions have already begun: to quote Perl:"For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince and now Cai-Guo qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth, who has been given the keys to Rome."

Perl’s essays are a lamentation for a paradise lost, for what little we have gained on this modern train to nowhere. Like the old man on the train who bemoans the fact that he missed his stop but won’t get off at the next stop to take the next train back, he understands the arrow of time points  forward. But maybe we have the wrong metaphor. Maybe we are just going around in circles.

I published this on my blog awhile ago.Charles Giuliano thought this was a good sequel to his critique of MFA programs today

"Impressions of France",1995 Museum of Fine Arts,Boston
It was picked up by Karen Wright at "Modern Painter" for an issue on Cezanne and was considered
"thought provoking" but ultimately was not published.

Elodie LaVillette,(1842-1917)

Paul Cezanne(1839-1906)