Winters,Held,Kiefer and Rothenberg at the Met

Summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Retitled "Capturing the Concentrated Moment" by Brett Baker of "Painters Table"

By: Martin Mugar - 07/22/2013

Click to Enlarge

Our being in the world is doubly constructed, first by our own personality and secondly by the public reality that by chance surrounds us. That we can’t jump out of our own shadow is a given when we take stock of ourselves. We are always situated in a place and time and that place and time is understood from out of our personal limitations and the constraints of  society. In the art world the place and time is defined by the art media, i.e. whatever is thrown up for us to respond to.  We do not choose what is given to us to observe. The fact of the matter is that most people accept both blindly. They are at ease with the destiny given them, and whatever the media presents on a monthly basis. To try to deconstruct these two is not an easy task and who would want to bother. At some point we accept our personality especially if we are by chance  hoisted up on the shoulders of the art world or render some sort of service for which we are compensated. Accepting the status quo can be lucrative as well. To be at ease with both must be heaven on earth.

I experienced something strange in the large room of post 60’s modernist work upon my last visit to the Metropolitan museum, that seemed to deflate a moment in time that was once a monumental part of my artistic life. What was on exhibit had the art establishment’s approval of being blue chip. The curators, the galleries, the collectors, and the critics (or some subset of critics) were all in agreement this must be work to consider seriously. There was a a black on white geometric shape painting by Al Held, a Terry Winters of webs and nets, the famous Anselm Kiefer painting of flowers made in part of straw, a Susan Rothenberg totemic abstraction. I can remember acknowledging their strength either in their art magazine reproductions or in museums. I accepted that they had cultural weight and that there was some serious thinking behind them. Held, the positivist, who believed in the reductive language of science. Winters using the same ellipses as Held  casts them more existentially likes nets upon the real. Rothenberg saw the underpinnings of the real hovering between shape recognition and amorphous paint. Kiefer meditated on the weight of Nazi past on a German in the modern world.

There was a strange feeling of desuetude in this room.  The paintings seemed to have less gravitas. I reflected on what caused the work to fade in stature before my eyes:  #1 the canvas as being able to express philosophical ideas seemed in doubt. #2 Maybe the first intersection with an idea and an image seemed to be where the artist stopped and suffered from arrested development. Lets consider #2: Winters with this casting of the net that catches nothing evokes the void, in the same way that Giacometti’s gestures create a space between the artist and the thing he is representing, without catching the thing itself. But does it suffice to say this once or does this meditation on the void merit a life long engagement and moreover can the net capture some essence over time. To do this would be more in keeping with the active nihilism that Nietzsche espoused. The constant orbiting of the self around the void that is suggested in the philosophy of Nishitani, which renders a deeper understanding of the void with each orbital passage. Benefitting from the availability of more recent work online by Winters it is clear that he did not go down that path and in fact seems to have wallowed in a lazy abstraction that is no better than what you see in regional art venues. Held’s positivist belief in Science was absolute and led him to a sort of delirious evocation of the self, expressed as its endless extension into as much space as nature provides it to fill. It seemed to come from a less cynical era and seemed analogous to the American exploration of outer space. It is interesting that Kiefer’s eschews structures except for the death houses and builds his paintings of flowers out of the fragile stuff of organic nature. They are the opposite of the reassuring solidity of Held’s structure by this German who saw positivist technology run amok in Nazi Germany. His work thrives on angst and guilt. However, as in Winters the repetition of the mood in recent work renders no new emotional territory. Rothenberg’s Dance on the edge of recognition and intransigent stuff is hard to repeat over a lifetime and keep  fresh. Judging from what I see online, Rothenberg’s latest work like Winter’s suffers from inertia. It is god forbid more representational than abstract. The passion is gone; the delicate yet important balance between the object and unshaped matter is no longer there. It is more image than raw material.

2009 Rothenberg

Maybe the work on display which was all from the 20^th century needed to be redeemed by a sense of an authentic journey, All of the work was mid career work and only Held, in his later years took his painting to a higher level. In the case of Winter’s, Rothenberg and Kiefer the work stagnates. The edgy realm they worked out of that seemed so culturally relevant does not seem worthy of the big name galleries they show in (I am still intimidated when I go into Sperone Westwater or Matthew Marks). I think that the artists bought into the labels that the art critics gave them. It was a perfect cultural storm of the work fitting into a cultural agenda and being successfully thrust on the public, but it was a storm in which their creativity did not survive.

Winters 2014

As long as people have a conscience and a sense of what lies underneath them, whether it is science or the void or the weight of history then painting will remain that concentrated moment, that intersection, where the self is shaped by its knowing of those realms. So I will abandon my first hunch that painting is dead. Maybe what I had to get over was the arrogance of the cartel that hyped the work, Now that the hot media presence has receded into history the paintings are left high and dry to function on their own. They are imbued with fragility. They are not supported by big ideas, just ideas. Maybe that is for the best. The New York art scene was bigger and noisier than it is now and the works were all over sized to match the egos of the artists and the dealers. The din of the battle of the titans has subsided and all that is left are the weapons created in that battle. They still communicate and maybe have more nuances than they did when they were often cudgels used to crush the competition.

I have jumped out of the shadow cast by these artists. And I have jumped out of the shadow cast by my own limitations. I am no longer susceptible to being impressed. I am not surrounded by artists with their fawning need to situate themselves within a context. There are ideas in these paintings that still communicate. I hope there are younger painters who will learn from their exploration of the visual to embody their emotions and ideas.

P.S.
Another big name has jumped the rails: Gerhard Richter. I gave him credit for the squeegee paintings that seemed to function as an event. This new work, as his whole involvement with color was never organic, could not evolve into a new space and is therefore limp and looks like carnival spin painting.
It is post-climactic.In the end his interest in color was in the material of the paint not an inner sense of color and mood.

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Reader Comments

From "Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship"

07-22-2013, 09:33 am

Good writing! D. H. Lawrence wrote a similar comment on art history in his article on Cezanne in Poets on Painters (Paperback).

From "Paul Pollaro"

07-22-2013, 09:31 am

Oh, yeah, I liked the Held. Yes Rothenberg has become a good illustrator and Kiefer has turned to feeling the heat and humidity on a summer day with a breeze. not a bad thing..

From "Mark Gottsegen"

07-22-2013, 09:30 am

We are both older and smarter and no longer taken in with the "next new thing [idea]." This was a good calming little essay.

Half of my entry in "100 Boston Artists" published by Schiffer Publishing

Addison has an interesting blog on Marsden Hartley that I commented on

"Dogtown", Cape Ann 

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-was-speaking-with-collector-of.html

"Not a Rose"or "Heide is not Heidi".A review of Heide Hatry's book and exhibit at Stux in New York City

Charles has published it on Berkshire Fine Arts

“Not a rose” or Heide is not Heidi,

Some artists are so outside the box that it appears impossible to insert them into any kind of narrative. Heide Hatry’s most recent efforts contained in a book of photos and numerous essays written about the work, at first glance seem to be one of those that defy labeling. To put an artist back in the box, although maybe not an obvious one, is a task I often use in writing my blog. It is probably due to having read too many social theorists, who for example see Impressionism as the outcome of urbanism disrupting our easy relationship to things at hand. I know for sure that this appears to many to be just another procrustean bed, where the poor artist gets his or her limbs lopped off to fit some notion of their life in a time and space. But in fact it works the other way around. Inserting the artist into a context can actually bring them alive. It gives them eyes and ears to the influences around them. Hermeneutically we are always working with preconceived ideas.

Heide Hatry’s latest work, displayed in the book “Not a Rose” could be analyzed aesthetically. She uses animal organs to reconstruct them in the shape of flowers. She does it so well that you do not recognize the photos taken of these short-lived constructions as being made from offal, recently collected from the abattoir. The intelligence and talent of the artist is obvious. There appears to be an understanding of ikebana judging from the adroitness of the “flower’s” arrangement.

To look at the work solely in terms of its aesthetics, is not satisfactory.  Moreover, structural analysis may not tell the whole story either. All artists use raw material to shape objects that transcend their origins. El Anatsui for example takes tin cans and bottle caps to weave wall hangings. As artists we are all involved in transformation of one material into another reality. Paint becomes light. Glass becomes a flower. But the outrageousness of using butchered animals as the literal raw material to create flowers makes it impossible to leave her floating outside of the box. Sheep clitoris becomes a daisy. Something needs to be unpacked. What is she up to? Where is she coming from?

One hint is to be found in her work that precedes this recent body of work. Portraits of women with the faces made out of pigskin, that at first glance appear quite real. Not the tanned version on a football but the real flesh, whose shelf-life I have heard from a gallery assistant unfortunately got extended once beyond the expiration date. For me this portraiture points to an obvious influence: Hatry is looking at Cindy Sherman and enters into the realm of identity politics. Identity politics deconstructs the social image (the face) as being infinitely pliable so as to free it from whatever society might impose on it. There is no permanent self because there is no self to begin with, just myriad images we can concoct at will. We see a face that looks like Marilyn Monroe, only to see that momentary recognition questioned by the disturbing suggestion that this is an invention made of animal flesh. These deconstructive notions of self have permeated our world to such a degree that Hillary Clinton can in a calculative way change her image from one public event to the next. One day she is dowdy, the next sexy, or scholarly. Accepting the image that society expects of you is no longer an unshakable burden.

Another obvious influence comes from one of the most famous contemporary artist as provocateur: Damien Hirst, who is famous for displaying in a glass box a whole sheep embalmed in formaldehyde. The use of this noxious fluid recalls the work of another artist, Serrano’s “Piss Christ”. Hirst’s embalmed sheep remains one huge affront to human sensibility. The goal of the artist as provocateur is to mix objects or activities that rarely share the same space in order to shock the bourgeois sensibility that needs to separate out human activities in order to function. The first time I understood this ploy was in Mapplethorpe’s photo of a man dressed in a suit with his substantial penis hanging out of the open zipper. Two different realities, ”suits”, the costume of business, ”cock” the reality of in this case of homosexual sex. If the body had been totally naked we could have entered into the allowable social category of the nude. But the two realities are shown together and create a good deal of cognitive dissonance. Is this what Hatry is doing? quaint flower arrangements done by the museum docents conflated  with the reality of the harvested sexual organs of animals. Two categories of experience normally separated. On the one hand we have the decoration or gift of choice for weddings, birthdays and funerals, so integrated into our cultural norms, with its notion of evanesce, delicacy and hope. To make them out of animal parts that have never been used in those contexts before succeeds in destroying the flower as vehicle for reverie. The perfume and delicacy of the flower is the product of the plants sexuality. Hatry seems to be a woman on a mission to abolish all separations of human activity. She brings the abattoir into the flower shop. Her own little shop of horrors. This balancing act is more interesting than HIrst and even Hatry’s earlier work which shows her butchering animals and wallowing in the blood. The subtle weaving of bourgeois notions of beauty and the reality of carrion where the flesh is almost flower and the flower we imagine almost flesh is mesmerizing and straddles exquisitely the fence of tradition and taboo.

Since the 19thc “Epater le bourgeoisie” has been the preferred habit of avant-garde poets and artists. Take the bourgeoisie’s shibboleths and show their hypocrisy. The world of work and production, of science and industry has been built by separating out many of our activities that were once accomplished side by side. Dialectically to criticize these disparities has been a powerful force for social change. Animals are raised in industrialized settings far from view by transient labor and end up in packages in the antiseptic supermarket. Hatry’s earlier work showing her performing the slaughter herself tries to bridge that gap.

Hatry’s goal in “Not a Rose” is to show that the sexual organs of a sheep can be as beautiful as flowering plants. However, a flower is as much about air and perfume as it is about physical construct. She succeeds more in cutting away our need to believe in delicacy and nuance. She can’t have it both ways. She uses the delicacy of flowers to validate the beauty of animal life but takes it away from flowers. Moreover, breaking down the walls between categories of human activity is a dangerous game. Jeffery Dahmer comes to mind as someone who saw people as food or the making of lampshades from human skin in Nazi Germany is another. Animal rights activists seem to think Hatry is working on behalf of animal liberation. Ultimately a rose is a rose is a rose.* It remains an integral part of our culture of gifts, recognition and reciprocity. I suppose to liberate it from the greenhouses where it is mass-produced, would be a nobler cause for Heide to pursue.

Trying to conflate the world of animals and those of plants is more than slightly diabolical and has more in common with genetic engineering, which is currently blending animal and plant genetic material. Maybe the shock of the new will pass as the shock value of so much critique of social norms fades with time. Mapplethorpe’s photos seem dated probably because the separation of public and private (parts) is not longer so extreme. Ads for erectile disfunction are commonplace and condoms are handed out at school.

…Or Serrano’s piss Christ is no longer effective when the object of its derision the Catholic Church is in such disarray. I hate to think what societal norms will have to expire for Hatry’s work to be commonplace.

*Addison Parks contributed an essay to Hatry's book that he reproduces on his Artdeal blog.It talks about flowers and our day to day life

Addison Parks very thoughtful review of my half of the Bromfield show from last WInter.

It is not every day that an artist gets to be so clearly understood.



http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/2013/04/being-there-martin-mugars-fire.html

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)