Monday, July 14, 2014
Sunday, July 6, 2014
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.
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.
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
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
The New Realism:Ananian, Deyab, Lee and Mugar
I am not talking about Realist art per se, although a
realist painter will be included in my discussion, but an attitude toward life
that is realistic. I first touched on this in my critique of the Boston Art Scene and the Marathon bombings. I had just finished up a show in Boston that winter
with Paul Pollaro. I had not shown in Boston since 2007, so it was a re-acquaintance
with the Boston art world. The then current Boston art scene seemed to me to be
more interested in providing well-crafted objects and weak sentimentality than
with trying to understand the depths of the world we live in. Just the ripples
on the surface not the powerful forces that shape that surface. The political elite’s reaction to the Bombings
later that Spring seemed to say that they had rather support a veneer of
meaning, propped up by platitudes, than deal clearly with the nature of
the world that produced such horror. In the case of the Marathon deaths, the
political class brought out the big guns to channel Boston’s enthusiasm for
sports so as to heal an emotionally rattled city overcome by this tragedy. It all
reeked of Babbitry.
I recall in high school working late one night on an essay
on "Moby Dick". I could not figure out the mystery of it all and the solution of
a mystery seemed to be essential to the book and to writing a successful essay.
Who is Ahab, what drives him? How do we function is a world shaped by mad
leaders? It seemed ridiculous to hand in a paper that left the big questions
unanswered. I am sure that most of my
classmates could have cared less. I remember going to bed at midnight, the night
before the paper was due, somewhat disheartened with my unresolved essay, only
to wake up a few hours later with an insight into the problem. It lay in the “Try
Works” chapter. Recently, because I couldn’t remember what the chapter was
about , I googled the title of the chapter. I was not surprised it was a meditation on the
need for perseverance and faith as one passes through the dark night of evil
and sorrow, captured by the patterns of fire and smoke spewing from the rendered
flesh of a freshly killed whale. “There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a
woe that is madness.” says Ishmael. How do we navigate that distinction? It
made me think of Clint Eastwood in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” who hovers between
the two woes; one a wisdom born of sorrow; the other a kind of madness, akin to
Ahab’s?
All I have reread at this point is that chapter but I am
astonished how much there is to unpack in each sentence. The end of the short chapter
describes Ishmael’s realization that he has been steering the Peqoud ass-backwards
and is close to capsizing the whole boat for me is a searing image of an upside
down topsy-turvy world full of mistakes that are combined to weave the fabric
of reality itself.
"Victim "2014 Deyab |
There are a handful artists, and I will include myself , who are emotionally robust enough to look at the shape of things and
depict them accurately. I think the key to their way of thinking and feeling is
an ability to see things in context: a kind of intuition of the whole or a
knack at seeing what “is” in the context of the unseen. Larry Deyab at first
glance can appear to be a so hip and contemporary with his preferred use of spray
paint, photographic journalistic source material and a Richard Prince sense of
the edit and erasure. But his art embraces a totally un-contemporary sense of
horror more akin to Goya than Prince as he responds to the ongoing chaos of the
Middle East. His preferred media of spray paint provides an identification with
the lives of the victims who have been reduced to poverty and terror and if
asked to paint their condition could not go the a fine art store to buy
brushes. It conveys a sense of urgency and identifies with the victims with the
brush of urban anger,spray paint. His subject matter heretofore dealt the
Arab-Israeli conflict, now stands aghast before the unwillingness of the
Western powers to engage in the Syrian conflict that is moving rapidly toward
genocidal proportions: Images of blind fate, the hammer of doom. Victim and
victimizer. The emotions go beyond the photo journalistic source of the images
but seem more akin to some generational and macabre dance of evil.
Excess is at the heart of these conflicts. Over the top annihilation
of the opposition, a fury that knows no boundaries. Confronting and engaging
this aspect of life and death is not something easily achieved with Realism,
nor with Abstraction for that matter. I attempted to engage these issues in my work
from the late Nineties, shown at Crieger-Dane in Boston and has remained an
issue that seems to escape the critics. Or maybe they see it but it is that
very notion of excess that puts them off. Somewhere in my career I lost any
desire to make art as a vehicle of self-expression. The Neo-Expressionism of
the 80’s seemed to be the last gasp of that self-centered version that came out
of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s.I wanted a language that would embody the state
of things of things as they are. Things as they are swimming in a sea of forces
bigger than themselves. But also as inevitably forced into conflict with each
other. The titles of the work gave them away: “Mackerel Crowded sea “,”Sargasso
Sea”, “Footprints”. The first title is taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”,
a poem that establishes a sharp contrast between the modern reality of man as
swarm and a more god based hierarchy that lends a ground of eternity to our individual
existence. “Sargasso Sea” created in my mind a sort of organic island without
substance that houses enumerable species….”Footprints” imagines a larger force
squashing lesser forces. The latter title and painting is no permission for this
sort of oppression but a rather sang-froid description of academic politics. I
have always felt that the sadism that we love to imagine is so far from our day-to-day
lives virulently in the perverse little politics of the world we work in.
Mike Ananian’s realism evokes implicitly a kind of male
stoicism that reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”: the life of
someone who has to get up for work each morning to fulfill his sales quota, whether
there is pleasant background music or not. I also think of Mamet’s “Glengarry
Glen Ross”, where real estate brokers driven by the Darwinian will to prevail, are
capable of undercutting their colleagues, selling questionable properties and
committing crime. There is no room for humor or grace, only the hope that their life of struggle has some heroic meaning. The characters in
Ananian’s portraits seem to carry their faces like Roman portrait busts without
any halo of divinity.
"Helmet" by Billy Lee |
They are strangely reminiscent of his UNC-G colleague Billy Lee’s sculptures of heroic hoplite heads. Guardian’s and sentinels that are eye-less. They don’t observe anymore; they have been reduced to pure
will. They are holding their ground full of a contained phallic fury.
Maybe my work and the work of Deyab, Lee and Ananian is lacking
in irony, the staple of contemporary art. We are not
fetishistic in the creation of our art objects, just forcing our images to remind the
viewer of the hardness of survival. No bromides, no fatuous statements about
commodification. This work is not fun. No matter how hard we try to create fantasies about the human condition and leaders and gurus to fulfill them we
can’t escape the grim reality of conflict.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Can you jump out of "Enframement"? Or is everything just mostly post modern?
2021 #98 oil and wax on canvas on board.It functions on so many levels as pointed out by Dennis Hollingsworth: "Text Peeking, Ground Margins Geometry Tweaking." |
My attempt to rethink the notion of provisional painting seems to have had some success judging from the number of favorable responses from people, who had written about this quasi-movement. I say qausi in the sense you are not going to see photos of the Provisionalists, as you did of the Abstract Expressionists photographed in bars together discussing their theories. It is more an educated guess of what appears to be a cultural Zeitgeist. Sort of in the realm of Facebook “likes”. Moreover, I suspect that many of these artists identified as provisional don’t either know each other or reject the label. Has there ever been a schism within the movement?
What worked for me in order to get a handle on this movement was to take a
deductive approach in analyzing it. Rubinstein, (N.B.)hanging out in the Brooklyn art scene, began to see
similar gestures and strategies that led him to assume a certain cultural
mood was informing all these artists. My approach accepted that there is
always a Zeitgeist, which is shaped at any given time by overarching forces,
that influences how we act. Whereas he pieced it together empirically, I
worked with a notion that is historial, i.e. history gets its impetus from
certain seminal ideas that can shape generations. They can work their way
into society from the top down and slowly transform it, so that at any given
time within an era we can see a stage of that idea’s evolution say from Dada
to Punk. The idea will hit a dead-end, lose its shaping power, at which
point something totally contradictory will take hold of society to disrupt
the status quo. Working with
Vattimo’s ideas
of nihilism, I detected a certain winding down of metaphysics in the
provisional painters. This social phenomenon that he observed in the artists
he met was accurate but he failed to see it as just a particular moment in
an ever-evolving push/pull with the nihilist impetus, initiated by
Nietzsche, more than a hundred years ago. Nietzsche predicted that
Nihilism’s rejection of higher values, to which we aspire as in Plato’s
notion of the Good or in Superman’s slogan: ”Truth, Justice, and the
American way”, would lead to a slow devolution of the individual into a kind
of atomized irrelevancy.
2018 |
Critics began to see provisionality everywhere. It crops up in Matisse.
Every erasure somehow foreshadowed the artists of the early 21st
century, whereas in reality Matisse and the provisionalists could not be
more different in intent. The aesthetic attitude toward phenomena of Matisse
is grounded in a will to control them, based in a positivistic view of the
self. Self-consciousness imparts a priori to visual events a certain shape
or structure. That structure is not conceived totally intact but is intuited
over time. The self-conscious artist is like a scientist empirically
collecting data but with the intent of shaping it into a coherent whole.
Matisse may have had doubts at any given moment in the execution of a
painting but there is a will to the whole that puts him at antipodes to the
artists of Provisionalism. Their's is a “what me worry” approach to art
untouched by the “anxiety of influence” that most likely represents a
dead-end of metaphysic’s influence on art, for which Vattimo provides the
perfect notion of “weak thought”.
I have been accused on my blog by some artists of being a
curmudgeon, unwilling to see the good in what is being done in contemporary art, or
by others of not presenting a more positive path for artists to follow. Actually my latest blogs are really not attempts to blame or praise but to
dispassionately place (with the occasional snarky comment) what I have seen
in the galleries into a larger intellectual and historical context. Without
explicitly saying it, I have negatively implied what I think would be a more
profitable and rich route to follow in art. I had to accept that the
Zeitgeist is one of Nihilism, so that a provisional painter, who is
perceived to be deconstructing the polish and technological purity of Koons, is just expressing another aspect of nihilism already embedded in
Koons. So, if Nihilism were so pervasive, in order to jump out of its grasp
would be to, in a historial sense, establish a new beginning. (I use
historial as opposed to historical to distinguish between a sense of history
being the play of ideas that we swim in vs. just a list of facts and events
that occurred over time). How to do that?
Sometimes, I muse about the centrality of the role of the written word in
society and whether its centrality is not being replaced by computer code.
Both languages achieve the same purpose, which is to establish a notion of
temporal stability or what Heidegger calls “the while”. The reality of the
Internet and the computer is one of a constant presence and presencing and
words for example, what I am writing now, are establishing the presence of
my view on art. Both are also propositions about what is real. But the
Internet is more incontrovertible. The network of electricity that runs the
computer, the fuel that runs the power plants that make the electricity and
the interaction of hardware and software is based on a science that is not a
proposition that you can easily deconstruct (pace Derrida). Moreover, as
physical fact, it integrates and coordinates the activity of countless
people, businesses, countries and political institutions. Heidegger calls
this scientific reality “enframement”. Like nihilism it is all around us. It
is the real that is rational and in turn its rationality is our reality. But
just defining enframement, can’t change the reality of this scientific
domain, which insures that we live in a mass culture where everything is
wired together. Every attempt to break the bonds of the scientific
stranglehold gets co-opted by the system. We all have our individual cell
phones but the NSA monitors them all. We have our laptops that we can carry
around with us and personalize but by virtue of being part of the World Wide
Web our activities on that web are monitored.
To get back to my point, writing and for that matter painting, unlike our
cyber-reality, are the evocations of personal time and are grounded in our
body and mind. Painting still privileges the individual and their own notion
of time. It is, as well, in an inevitable dialogue with all that painting
has ever been, so that intentionally or otherwise the artist is forced to
accept the history of painting. Its uniqueness lies in its ability to create
time out of its own language, which forces the viewer to linger in front of
it. It has physical presence
that can only be experienced in a gallery, face to face with the viewer. It
can just have a vertical presence that it imposed on the viewer as in a
Barnet Newman abstraction. It can stop time as in Richter’s work, or disrupt
our routine by turning the world upside down as in Baselitz. Make it
repetitive as in Stella’s early work. Explode time into post-apocalyptic
dissolution as in Pollock or dogmatically have color push and pull the eye
into the canvasses space from the surface and back to it again as in
Hoffmann’s work. Kelley by deconstructing the structural elements of the
canvas that support the color in a sense dismantles time, (the ultimate
manifestation of my
Humpty Dumpty effect).
The late philosopher
Reiner Schurmann
in discussing Heidegger’s notion of time makes the point that time is a
societal construct purely created by man. His “Broken Hegemonies” is a
powerful exposition of the way cultural notions of “what man is” can hold
sway for centuries privileging one view of action over others. These
paradigms are topological, in that they shape time and space, so that modern
art will look very different from a Medieval art. The stain glass at
Chartres vs. “Broadway Boogie Woogie”. These notions tend to favor group
identities and organization over the individual. For Schurmann this gives
rise to the tragic condition, when an individual’s actions are out of step
with the prevailing and/or new cultural paradigms. It is in particular
tragic when there are cultural shifts that leave people, who espouse the
values of an earlier reality, stranded in a brave new world. A story from
ancient Greece that captivates Schurmann most, so that it becomes a
leitmotiv of “Broken Hegemonies” is that of Antigone, who ignores the laws
of the state to bury her brother Polynices. Polynices, who has been killed in his attempt to wrest back the throne from
his brother Eteocles, is considered an enemy of the state and not worthy of
proper burial. Antigone inspired by what she sees are more eternal values
such as the bonds of family and the ancient will of the Gods ignores the
laws of the state. For this she is executed. This notion of conflict between
deeply held personal beliefs and those of the status quo becomes
paradigmatic of the tragic condition of humanity.
In an earlier book by Schurmann “Heidegger on Being and Acting”, he refers
to cultural paradigms as grounded in “arche”, original seminal events from
which they draw their energy. The question he raises and which he feels is
central to Heidegger’s thought is the following: Can we act
anarchically? By this he means
without why and without goal, not chaotically. Every epoch is defined by an
event that controls how individuals act and how they perceive the whole.
Notions of the present and presencing become paramount in the language of
Heidegger as well as epochal definitions of how that present is defined.
Take for example what he considers to be the last great epoch of mankind
that we are still experiencing: the Modern era of self-consciousness
initiated by the language around Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum”. It posits
reality on our ability to know it rationally. Schurmann defines the Medieval
era as one where the individual seeks to be defined by the light of God,
which comes from above. In the Modern era man is his own light and shines it
on reality. (I suddenly think of our life in cars with their headlights on
aimed ahead of us as we willy-nilly try to define our time and space). This
notion of the self implies a transcendental attitude toward the self as
subject to which everything becomes either object or objectified. It gets
inflated to the notion of the Nation or the People as in Communism.
Heidegger, who had already in his early work tried to ground mankind in the
world into which he is thrown, becomes more conscious of the definitions of
the overarching society, which are extensions of the individual definitions
to the world when he himself gets caught up in National Socialism. All his
subsequent writing is aimed at extricating the fallacies of his thought that
lead to that association.
A word that comes up in discussions of Heidegger’s very Nietzschean and
aphoristic “Contributions to Philosophy” is poiesis. It is meant to indicate
the growth of something in time out of a unique origin. It is held up in
distinction to the propositional nature of modern western thought.
Propositional thinking pins things down, stops them like a snapshot and or
entangles them in mathematical formula. Poiesis lets things be and
understands them in their reality in the world as a nexus of events.
Heidegger is totally cognizant of the reality of modernity and comes
up with several notions that allow us to get a handle on it: one is
Machination, the other giganticism. Machination came out of his reading of
Ernst Junger’s ”The Worker” which studied the total mobilization of a nation
during the National Socialist era but it could be as easily applied to
Fordism in the United States. Giganticism tries to grasp the economics of
enormous scale that define the US and Russia of the Soviet era. For
Heidegger this is the outcome of the metaphysics of self-consciousness as it
evolves into economics of quantity over quality. How does one live on this
“monstrous site” ?(Schurmann’s words)
Schurmann describes three modern strategies to avoid the tragic view of life
that was mentioned above. “If there is a task and a possibility for thinking
today, it can only be that of letting normative consciousness collapse-not
by putting a stop to philosophy so as to pass on, whether to the science
#1(the Anglo-Saxon temptation), or to literature #2(the French temptation)
but by learning not to have wholehearted faith in semantic maximization.”
The third is the phenomenology of Husserl, who covers over the abyss with
clear unambiguous ideas and shapes that have a certain
incontrovertible nature to them. Husserl had been instrumental in
establishing the notion of intentionality, that all ideas are about
something and therefore place us in a lived world. Intentionality had a big
impact on his student Heidegger. However, Husserl remained unwilling to put
the self completely in the world as Heidegger did, holding on to the
self-conscious apprehension of the world in clear and distinct ideas. These
were referred to as “eidetic”
reductions, or observable and concrete shapes and form of what is. This, I
believe had a big influence on those artists whose language is purely
intended for societal maximization of the technological: Malevich, Mondrian,
Stella, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Wade Guyton, minimalist architecture. Only
Rothko knows he is papering over the void.
When I taught Western Civilization at UNC-Greensboro, my first lecture
started with slides of sculptures of men on horseback dating from the
Assyrians to modern times. These for me embodied the reality that all
civilizations are built on the backs of a suppressed people and that the
first examples of art showing sympathy for the oppressed were Delacroix’s
massacre at Chios and Goya’s black paintings. Schurmann says as much when he
makes the point that all public realms are built out of a tragic event where
family bonds are sacrificed as in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia or
Creon’s execution of Antigone.
First time I imposed a major reworking of a figurative painting (1986)(private collection Florida) |
I doubt that this notion of the tragic will ever become central to any
modern aesthetic. It is not how the world works. The Modern world needs common currency to perform its day-to-day tasks. It has to be inert
and function as multiples. I thought of how perfect Wade Guyton's inkjet
images function as inert units of printed exchange. At all costs the objects
that the Wall Street hedge funds buy have to be drained of human feeling.
And if there is any horror these days at the positivist and commercial bias
of our artistic language it is only snarky and dandified.
How does one paint in the context of society enframed by the technological
and the commercial? If Schurmann imagines that “normative consciousness”
should collapse, what does he mean by that? He refers elsewhere to a
distinction between societal time and primordial time. Is this the leap we have to take to experience something alive and new?
Heidegger applies all sorts of thought experiences to contextualize the
societal notion of time. Sometimes he sets it off against the darkness of
the earth and talks of how the artist uses the earth in his or her painting,
a literal grounding of the abyss. At other times he imagines society (the world) interfaced with the abyss.
Another thought experiment is his notion of letting things be. Not
entrapping the world in a framework of science. Letting the things “thing”
or the world “world”.
Transition from figuration to abstraction with color reduction(Massachusetts collection ,1989) |
"Yellow Submarines"(private collection Germany,1994) |
"At Sea"(private collection Paris) One of a series of split images facing off |
"The Arrow" 1995 |
"Mulch Late 90's with a sense of multiplicity.i.e. "thinking out of the multiple not reduction" |
"Footprints" Late 90's |
View of world of the war of all against all.Late 90's |
1997 "Sargasso Sea" I used to see this as some sort of biological soup but now wonder if this was my first attempt at using writing in my work. |
Using icing applicator I mark time and wait.Trying to jump out of
the war of all against all mid 2000's( New York Collection) |
Since 2000 I have pursued an art that abandons the languages that I had so
assiduously acquired over many years. I began with a flat surface of dots
and expanded the affects of that vocabulary incrementally over time: adding
wax to bring the paint off the surface, dripping the paint off the bottom of
the canvas, using more and more color combinations, applying paint with a
frosting applicator to bring back the volume that I had abandoned in my move
from figuration to abstraction and reviving the figure/ground ambiguity by
playing variations in the center off of the sides. Most recently, I have
abandoned that sort of centrality to an all-over approach, where no one area
has primacy over any other in order to foreground the freedom of each mark.
I am hesitant to try to apply any of Schurmann or Heidegger’s concepts to
describe my work; for fear that one might think that my paintings are
conscious attempts to apply their theories. If there is an influence it is
indirect. Poiesis, the evolution of the painting over time is probably
relevant. Primordial time embodied in the work itself which is unforced. The
embodiment of the “while”, not time engaging an imposition but of
letting
Ekstasis of Repetition.2013 |
These more recent works use letters as a basis to build the paintings.This straddling of two cognitive realms is another ecstasis and was unexpected.It seems to contradict my earlier emphasis on phusis over against the verbal realm. Did I jump back into enframent?
#99 2021 |
N.B.Rubinstein has subsequently mentioned in "Art in America" that I coined the phrase:
Zombie Formalism.
I can be followed on twitter @mugar49
Link to my book on Amazon
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