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| 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 quasi 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?
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| #104 2024 |
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.
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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.
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First time I imposed a major reworking of a figurative painting
(1986)(private collection Florida)
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I don’t think that art likes to dwell in this spot and if it does it is most
often not for long. Schurmann borrows the pair of concepts, natality and
mortality from Hannah Arendt, with whom he taught at the New School in New
York, to show how each new generation (natality) favors maximization of
ideas that give new shape to society: whether it be socialism or communism
or technology. He uses also the word "thetic", which I take to be equivalent
to ideological to describe how ideas become totalizing during the reign of
any given Hegemony. Each generation takes the world for their own bowl of
cherries. But as they age their singularity (Mortality) becomes more
important or the "thetic" realm can be so harsh as it was for Shostakovich
in the Soviet Union that his work is from the beginning all about the
struggle of the individual against the ideological realm. Most of his
colleagues were happy to sing the praises of the Soviet People and the
nomenclature, although they acknowledged the superiority of Shostakovich’s
genius, had little tolerance for the schizoid back and forth between harmony
and dissonance. The evolution of say Michelangelo from the metaphysical
glories of the Last Judgment to the poignant unfinished pietas captures that
transition perfectly. Hired by the Church at the height of its power to
describe the interpenetration of heaven and earth to singularizing his own
struggle to transcend his mortality is the epitome of pathos.
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”.
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Transition from figuration to abstraction with color
reduction(Massachusetts collection ,1989)
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"Yellow Submarines"(private collection Germany,1994)
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I have always painted out of a reverence for the many visual languages that
are available to any artist who wants to ground their work in visuality (
my website)
I would like to think I have followed Heidegger’s notion of thinking
as thanking. I observed in the evolution of Western Art over the 20
th
century, a move toward understanding optically how we perceive the real. I
saw each stage as an expansion of the power of the vocabulary afforded the
artist so that, oblivious to the current art scene, I would try to absorb
for example the colors of the Fauves, when the art world was enthralled by
Minimalism, in so far as I saw it as step toward understanding more deeply
what made Minimalism possible. To reduce my language to simple and pure
colors as building blocks was for me a singular achievement. At any given
point in this evolution I would hit on something that pushed back or
glimmered out of the dust of my search, similar to a prospector hitting pay
dirt. By the mid-Nineties I had pretty much worked my way up to the push and
pull language of Hoffmann using pure flat color shapes. The flip-flop of
figure ground ambiguity intrigued me. It slowed time down in the painting as
it held the attention of the patient viewer, who could wait for the image to
rearrange itself. Around the mid to late Nineties, something took hold of my
work. Whereas up until that point I was reducing the images to simple
flatness, which was an act of will that embodied conflict, a sense of
multiplicity of being part of a world, that was bigger than my own personal
struggle to make sense out of the space on my canvas, took hold of my work
rather spontaneously . This acceptance of the multiple as a basis for
organizing a painting lead me through an evolution, where all conflict
seemed to create a sort of delirium that lead to its disappearance.
The goal of the painting was to listen to it as a whole.
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"At Sea"(private collection Paris)
One of a series of split images facing off
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"The Arrow" 1995
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"Mulch
Late 90's with a sense of multiplicity.i.e. "thinking out of the
multiple not reduction"
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"Footprints" Late 90's
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View of world of the war of all against all.Late 90's
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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.
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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)
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An event takes place as I am waiting(private collection
Massachusetts)
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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
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Ekstasis of Repetition.2013
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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?
