Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Friday, May 22, 2015
Topoi of Contemporary Culture: Thomas Kinkade, McDonalds and MoMA's "Forever Now"
For a recently curated show I attempted to write an essay about
the paintings in terms of topology. I came across the more than geographic use
of it in a book by Jeff Malpas, which deals with its role in understanding
Heidegger’s philosophy. I didn’t want to give the impression of co-opting the
artist's work for my own intellectual purposes, so I wrote about the work in the
context of contemporary art. However, not
a day goes by without experiencing astonishment at the power of the word topos to unlock
the mysteries of how the world functions. With the show over, I will now explore the tropic of topos in terms of the society as a whole.
Leibniz asked:” Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Which was similar to Heidegger marveling that “things function”. Both express awe
in the face of the amazing phenomena of life on earth. And both are questions
meant to generate a meditation on our being in the world. Heidegger prefaced
any understanding of functioning by insisting we are already in a world shared
with other people and any functioning takes place within a certain economy (Reiner
Schurmann’s word for topos) i.e. there is an overall shape to how we interact in
the world and with people, an ongoing back and forth and a moving forward. Most
often that configuration is given or imposed on us. For example we work in a
certain place where our activities are highly structured. It has its hierarchy,
its obligations: it may be funded by state taxes or it may be capitalist and
depend on profits. The shock of the unforeseen may be softened by the purchase
of insurance. All this gives a workplace a certain appearance and predictability
over time. The way things look is the purview of art and each economy will have
a certain appearance. The Soviet Union for example looked a certain way that
perfectly reflected its top down management of the economy. I read recently how the dour feel of Moscow
during the Soviet Era that I witnessed in the early Seventies while touring
Eastern Europe, quickly became energized with the fall of the Iron Curtain and
the concurrent influx of western capital. I recall during that tour through the
Soviet Bloc how the absence of a market economy resulted in strange local
markets such as one that only sold locally produced cherries. Tasty and fresh
but I was not interested in having them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
In a search for the use of the term Zombie Formalism on the Internet,
I came across a site that rambled on about what they thought was the capitalist
origin of the white cube, i.e. the typical gallery space. The Marxist tilt of the
language implied that galleries provide a certain topos of indifference so as
to let the object appear to be more valuable and significant as a commodity than
it really is. I wrote a comment on the site invoking another Heideggerian
concept of “letting be”. How far do we have to deconstruct things? Does every
capitalist structure have to be analyzed as a power game that reduces
everything to commodification? I recalled the efforts of a Marxist friend to do
his own dental work with store bought epoxy so as to avoid participating in the
Capitalist system by going to a dentist. However, this article nonetheless helped
me understand the topos of the gallery, when it became an issue in the show at
Kimball Jenkins whose exhibition space was funky to say the least. Some viewers
complained about its lack of neutrality and the compromising of the work of
several artists, whose work would have been better showcased by white walls. Whether
it is a capitalist conspiracy or not the topography of a gallery does have a
say in how we interact with the exhibited object.
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| Koons |
“Hyperallergic” recently published a review of a book on
Thomas Kinkade and his demise. It appears that he was a simple sort of guy who
tried to peddle his work at country art fairs until he fell into the hands of
shysters who turned him into a nationwide purveyor of schlock. Sort of like
Koons’s kitsch but without the irony. (Koons has yet to open up franchises
selling his work or put little koonsies in a McDonald Happy Meal). I started
thinking of his scenery of quaint country cottages as a notion of the topos of family
and security. The smoke rising from the chimney, the calm of a setting sun bathing
the scene in a warmish light. This was a mood that mattered to him. And those
who bought the work needed that story and sentiment as well. When I drive to
Concord NH from Portsmouth on Route 4 there is a stretch of road midway that
goes through a state forest. A mountain stream and white pines and hemlocks
sidle up to the road to create a very bucolic setting. Just before this
environment comes to an end and the commercial sprawl that typifies the rest of the road
recommences there is the view of a lone antique farmhouse across the river. It
is as idyllic as a Thomas Kinkade or a Claude Lorrain for that matter. For a
moment it seems that to live there would be to live happily ever after.
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| Thomas Kinkade |
The topoi of our modern world have long left that sentiment far
behind, ever since the Enclosure Acts abolished the yeomanry of England sending
the poor to work in “the dark satanic mills”. The appearance of the past
lingers on in New England where you can jump back several centuries surrounded
by the rural past of countless New England villages. I once worked on a
conservation commission with a woman who bemoaned the disintegration of the Maine
town where we lived into urban sprawl using the word yeomanry to describe the people
who lived in those majestic Maine farmhouses that still dotted the landscape. Even
a place as close to Boston as Marblehead is a time warp of epoch proportions
where the rest of the world could easily drop away as you lose yourself in the
time of Nathanael Hawthorne. To continue my thesis, these topologies are the
remnants of once lived realities that historically minded people have succeeded
in preserving. But the topoi of the present awaits us on the highways
engineered to allow cars to drive at incredible speeds and surrounded by malls
and fast food outlets.
The first job I had teaching was at a private prep school
where I taught among other classes a course on architecture. I had no training
at all in the subject but my interest in perceptual issues allowed me to
discuss reasonably well how architecture constructed space and time. It helped
that the textbook we used by Charles Moore discussed those issues as well. Once
I took the students on a field trip to Boston to visit several buildings of
interest to the course. The students seemed intent on making a pit stop at
McDonald’s. I agreed to do it only if they did a space/time analysis of the
experience. In our discussion we observed that the reality of Mac Do’s was
totally dependent on the car and a notion of time, which engaged a rapid turnover of customers. Lots of
customers out on errands in their cars with no time to sit down for a meal
consuming factory produced food that could be prepared and consumed in the
twinkling of an eye. It is a very tight feedback loop. The goal was to squeeze
as many customers into the shortest time span possible. The interaction of
parts created a topology that went far beyond the moment of the purchase of the
food. Factory farms for the sandwich contents, factory production to process it
and factory distribution within the restaurant. All consumed sitting in your
factory made car. Here again Heidegger provides the wonderful notion of
enframement, i.e. you are trapped!
I was perusing the catalog of the “Forever Now” (Painting
in an atemporal world) show at MoMA at a bookstore in New York on a Sunday
before I had to head home to the New Hampshire woods. The first thought that
came to my mind upon reading it was something that Peter Schjeldahl picked up
on in his “New Yorker “ article on the show: much of the work is derivative of
the Neo-Expressionism of the 80’s. There is a shallow attempt in the catalog article
to put the burden of the work’s meaning on the influence of the internet and
its sense of the atemporal by resurrecting the writer William Gibson who wrote
about the early days of the web, when the novelty of cyberspace still reigned. Putting
aside the references to the internet, I tried to get my head around the notion
of almost forty years of painting stylistically the same. For me the title and
the work evoked existential nausea as it proclaims: there is no escape from
this art (to use the title of Sartre’s play) which will linger on forever and
ever. Amen! The notion of the atemporal once evoked a sense of eternal values worthy
of surviving the flux of the human condition. The strategy of these artists is to
engage in a notion of time that is eternally uniform. It reminds me of something
I recall in philosophy of a negative notion of time made up of a repetition of
“nows”. Lived time is full of tragic reversals and magical overcomings. In this
work there is no agonic attempt to surpass the masters: just abstract gesture
that is endlessly deconstructed tongue in cheek.
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| "Carlotta" Charlene von Heyl 2013 |
Sharon Butler once
quoted Beckett to me after a lecture she gave at MECA: “Try again. Fail again. Fail
better” in order to explain the intellectual underpinnings of Provisional/Casualist painting. From Beckett’s point of view the self that imagines that its
constructs of reality can shape the real is a false self. An authentic self is
one that accepts the distance between self-construct and the real. One that is
set up for failure a priori. The romantic whose self -image expands to engulf the
real is embodied in the sadist Pozzo in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” who
tortures the not so lucky, Lucky. Pozzo is the image of Western man created in
the Baroque that imposed an economy of slavery and exploitation upon the world based
on a metaphysical confidence grounded in an eternal God. Didi and Gogo are the
embodiment of contemporary man who is not sure of his goals and bereft of the
metaphysical underpinnings of the past. We are always going to fall short or
fall bad. But it is one thing to attempt
meaning and fail; it is totally different to assume failure and couch your work
in a feigned sense of futility. Or not to allow any meaning at all as the
Zombie Formalists assert. But what kind of meaning do you want? The work of the
modernist has a positive meaning with its faith in science and a clear sense of
the subject/self or its reversion to the chthonic symbolism of the pagan. But
isn’t the irony of this irony that somewhere once upon a time there was a kind
of painting that was too authoritative for this new eternity of weak painting to
exist at all. In its insistence on irony it keeps blocking any chance of a new
language of time and space. It is a kind of negative religion, a negative
eternity from which we can’t escape with its own rituals that any good MFA
student can learn.
It seems that history is divided into periods that are
transformative of human nature and those where the transformations are digested
or put in question. Without a doubt the 20thc was an era where the Human was
transformed into a rational animal disabused of any notion of the individual as
a separate entity with his or her own space and time. So what are we to do with
it? I know the post-modernist goal is to abandon the scientific/rational self
that creates experimental events on canvas that reveal the mechanical shape of
reality as a tight part/whole rule based relationship. Its practice can be seen
in the work of Mondrian, Stella, Judd and Serra among others that populate the
modernist pantheon. As its rules penetrate deeper and deeper into the fabric of
society it is no longer the hard nuts and bolts of the factory that Chaplin
mocked in Modern Times but the technological precision of the Internet that
infiltrates our very reality. Maybe this is the domain of the Zombie
Formalists. It is no longer an issue of creating the rational man but of
dissolving mankind altogether into rationality. The Provisional painters try to
humanize abstraction, make it vulnerable therefore corroborating Butler’s
contention of having its roots in Beckett.
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| Lucian Smith 2012 "Two Sides of the Same Coin" |
It is no surprise to me that abstraction has had a revival. The
avant-garde seems ever confident that every new critique of society will have a
welcoming audience. The latest Koons’ extravaganza I believe left a bad taste
in the collective unconscious of the public. My response was pretty much: So
what! Warhol already covered that territory with sharper nihilistic wit. The
need to jump over years of pop, concept and installation art back to
abstraction seems akin to someone who has had a schizophrenic break and tries
desperately to regain the world before the split, when things were whole. Is
the attempt to return to the garden also generated by a fear of the unknown, which
is now so great that we feel apprehensive about turning our back on the pinnacle
of American art (AbEx promoted by the CIA as the best America had to offer during
the Cold War) lest we no longer recognize who we are? But we can’t recreate its
greatness, just as we no longer have our parent’s self-assuredness. We are neither
the mothers nor fathers who built the modern industrial state for which
modernism was the topos. Either we use abstraction ironically or pathetically (with
pathos), or expunge any remnant of the self and let art blend into technology
by destroying the boundaries of the human and the machine. Any hermeneutic to
go back is doomed to miss the essence of the past. Contemporary abstraction is
caught in a twisted embrace with Modernism which ever escapes its hold and retreats further and
further into the past. How much longer will we limp along in this
contorted topology, that knows vaguely where it came from but for sure does not
know where it is going.
Martin Mugar
Martin Mugar
Monday, March 16, 2015
"Autonomy and Hypertext" A report from "Lighting out for the Territory" based on seeing the paintings up close and real
I am currently showing my work art Belmont Hill School in the Landau Gallery until the 28th of September 2017. The opening is from 11 to 2 pm on the 23rd of September.The address is 350 Prospect St, Belmont,MA. I think that this essay may also be helpful in understanding my work.
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| #81 2017 48"x42" |
My blog post on ”Lighting out for Territory “ was written based on images sent me by the participating artists. Since seeing the work all together and sharing discussions with the artists at the opening, I feel compelled to rethink what I wrote. My thesis was to see the artists acknowledging Minimalism but taking it to a new spot colored by a more complex notion of humanity. I think that I have been beating this drum in previous blogs so that the cumulative effect is both tedious and distracting from exactly what these artist’s are doing.
shift in opinion started when Paul Pollaro told me that
he observed a certain will to autonomy in my work. It was evidenced by how I assume
control at all levels of my painting of what the paint does, which to his eye,
seemed to push aside any lingering attachment to the object. He said, most artists
leave the static object somewhere in their work. It lingers there as the
remnant of the real, the world of the sitcom that I referred to in the "ConcordMonitor" piece. Probably why I always liked sailing. Reality is a nexus of force
and resistance and constant reconsideration of how to balance them, not a
stationary thing. The self is always in the middle of things. There is no
object/subject split.
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| #92 2020 |
The truth of that idea seemed reinforced by emails I
received from two artists in New York about my work, one a former student.(Ellie Pyle) Both responded enthusiastically
to the introduction of empty space in my work. One thought it came from a sense
of what lived beyond the object. She (Mary
Salstrom)said it could be the void or what she said the Chinese call Ma. I recall discovering that as a revelation when I observed a Southern Sung painting at the Nelson Atkins museum in Kansas City use of the blank paper. I marveled at how the reality of a lake was created by the placement of a boat. Or fog in the trees was created by the manipulation of values in the trees. In both cases this resulted in the expanded notion of the object after it engaged the void. The boat created the water and the trees create the mist. The one engages the whole. There are no isolated objects.
Salstrom)said it could be the void or what she said the Chinese call Ma. I recall discovering that as a revelation when I observed a Southern Sung painting at the Nelson Atkins museum in Kansas City use of the blank paper. I marveled at how the reality of a lake was created by the placement of a boat. Or fog in the trees was created by the manipulation of values in the trees. In both cases this resulted in the expanded notion of the object after it engaged the void. The boat created the water and the trees create the mist. The one engages the whole. There are no isolated objects.
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| Travers |
Jason’s work close up required adjustments in my
understanding of his work. There was one work that played romanticism off of
minimalism. But in “Flotsam” the minimalist part of the painting was of such a
pitch of darkness and off-putting texture to convey an emotion akin to anxiety. It brought to mind what Heidegger thought about moods in
general and the mood of anxiety in particular.
Simon Critchley says the following about how Heidegger considers
anxiety ;
“Anxiety is the first experience of our freedom, as a
freedom from things and other people. It is a freedom to begin to become
myself. Anxiety is the philosophical mood par excellence; it is the experience
of detachment from things and from others where I can begin to think freely for
myself.”
Anxiety is a precursor to autonomy.On the other hand there is also a sort of negative dialectic that Adorno postulated, where opposites sit side by side without being subsumed into a whole.There is an anti-Hegelian trope in Jason's work.An autonomy that leaves things linked like hypertext without imposing a resolution.If there is a resolution it exists outside of the canvas.
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| Addison Parks |
This will to autonomy asserts itself in Addison’s placement of the bold gestures in front of the square shapes. A statement about the self-in-the-world being more important than the products of the mind.
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| Carr |
Susan’s heightened brush movement reworks the gestures as
though she wishes to remove any remnant of the recognizable even the memory of
the stroke. Her thrust seems to be captured in the phrase from the Prajnaparamita:”Gone,
Gone, Gone, utterly beyond.”
Pollaro’s latest work considers autonomy as existing in the
world of hypertext, a world that is created by putting different definitions side by side. On the
one hand for Paul reality is functioning in the chthonic world of time before
the advent of the Gods of Olympus, which introduced the clarity of laws and
science. On the other hand his painting acknowledges the significance of that new world
which does not supplant the titans so much as function in a sort of symbiosis. As in Jason's work the solution of these two worlds exists beyond the painting.
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| Pollaro |
The more I delve into these issues, the notion of time and its relation to the canvas begin to perplex me. Instead of the harsh self-referentiality of Modernism, the paintings in this show seem to imply a synthesis somewhere other than in the works themselves.In the beyond in time or the utterly beyond of the prajna paramita.
Link to a blog that addresses notions of time in the "Forever Now" at MoMA
Thursday, March 12, 2015
I wrote a new article about the show from another angle in the Concord Monitor,Concord, NH
I just read the article and found it botched beyond recognition:In any case the link has expired.
Here is the original:
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| Artists left to right:Parks,Mugar,Travers and Pollaro(Susan left earlier) |
It is a world that is put together by waves of light, broken
down into a spectrum of colors and transformed by the complex physiology of the
eye into the image we see in our mind’s eye that we call reality. It is also a
world of laws and principles and mathematical formulas. If we look out our
window and see our garden it is not just a beautiful landscape with trees and
shrubs but through science we have knowledge of how a tree grows, how it
absorbs energy from the sun, and adjusts to the seasons or climate change.
Science has penetrated so deeply into the goings on of the body that there is
no longer just one doctor to take care of you but a myriad of specialties for
each organ and function of the body. Let’s imagine for a minute the effect of
science on an artist like Matisse. The show of his abstract cut-outs that he
did at the end of his life just closed at the Museum of Modern Art, and was one
of the best attended shows in the history of the Museum. At the Armory show in
New York in 1913, that showcased the avant-garde of Europe of which Matisse was
a part, there were protests over what was perceived as the cold and inhuman nature
of that kind of work. A little more than a hundred years later abstraction is sufficiently
assimilated into the culture that crowds no longer express horror at its
perceived crudeness but have come to praise its beauty. All that Matisse did in
his work was to acknowledge the role of color in our perception of reality and push
it to the foreground of his depiction of the world. He found that color when
used in isolated patches of warm and cool can be used to rebuild reality on
another platform. He understood that eyes use receptors that respond to color
as well as light and dark. Until the Impressionists picked up on what the
scientists had already studied in the physiology of the eye, art tended to use
color in a literal sense of say the color of a dress being green or red. But
when you realize that red and green are an optical construct of the eye, it
opens up a whole new energized world that ultimately leads to abstraction.
The artists in this show are probably the fourth generation
of abstractionists since the turn of the last century. The general direction of
abstraction since Matisse has tended toward simpler and less empathetic shapes
that ended in a movement called Minimalism, which dominated the art scene in
the Sixties and Seventies. Many of the artists in this show studied with
artists who were Minimalists or proposed in their teaching the use of austere
and simple shapes like a square within a square or just a canvas of one color. We
are all in our own way either wish to break out of Minimalism stylistically or
add the human psychology that Minimalism ignored. In the work of Paul Pollaro it
is the darkness and power of the earth not lit by the light of the Sun. Jason
Travers with his multi-paneled paintings is the most beholden to Minimalism of
all the artists in this show. On at least one panel within each painting there
is one that is a romantic atmospheric landscape. He pointedly seems to say: Is
flatness all there is to the goal of painting since Matisse. Susan Carr’s work
comes out of the tradition of Abstract Expressionism that preceded Minimalism. There
are none of the smooth flat planes typical of abstract art, just thick paint
that is heavily reworked that seemingly comes from a deep source like molten
lava pouring out of a volcano. My work reintroduces gestural marks that are
three dimensional as a reference to the three dimensional language of
perception that had had been part of representational painting prior to
abstraction. The colors play with the notion that color can be appetitive as
well as just optical and evokes flavors. Addison Parks uses the push and pull
of Matisse’s color language merged with the iconic shapes of nature to express
the vitality of organic form. His interests in the origin of abstraction in
Matisse remind me of the work of Bram Van Velde the famous Dutch painter
admired by Samuel Beckett.
As Art moves forward in its explorations it does not abandon
earlier movements but, as it moves toward ever broadening horizons, it circles
back to relive what was left behind. That is the strategy of the artists in
this show. We create a sort of hybrid art by taking the language of abstraction
and infusing it with the emotions of real life associated with realism.
I
Friday, February 27, 2015
Lighting Out for Territory , a group show at the Kimball Jenkins Galleries in Concord NH
I have curated a show of painting at the Kimball Jenkins School of Art 266 Main St in Concord,NH(right off I 93). It includes Susan Carr, Martin Mugar, Addison Parks, Paul Pollaro and Jason Travers. It will be up for the Months of March and April.The opening reception is 5-7 on Friday March 13th.There is also an article I wrote for the Concord Monitor that I wrote .Link Here
“Topos” didn’t go far in discussion especially when I
suggested it should replace painting as the noun to underpin the show. No! We
are painters seemed to be the consensus and that was that. I wasn’t going to
force the issue. In any case I agree, we are painters first and come out of the
world of painting. In our search for a title, I recalled from my high school
days the line spoken by Huck Finn at the end of the “Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn” that he wanted to “light out for
the Territory.” The context was that American Civilization as it was shaped and
defined by slavery pre-civil war was pretty murky and Huck thought he needed to
flee somewhere to try out new options. That phrase is embodied in American Westerns,
which are often set in the unincorporated territories of the West, where conflicting
interests were not easily adjudicated as laws were either non-existent or
unenforceable. It dawned on me I had injected the notion of “topos” through the
backdoor. Territory is derived from terra and is probably the latinate word for
“topos”. Artists are always nagged by a need to move out to some new terrain, to
not stay put. The “the” before territory got dropped along the way, but that
worked as well since artists are not moving out into a specific place but their
own psychic plot of ground. Huck’s words struck a chord and stuck.
ESSAY FOR THE SHOW
When the artists in this exhibit exchanged emails with ideas
for the show’s title, I had hoped to push a concept involving “topos”, the Greek
root of the word topology. I have always had affection for ancient Greek words
that embody concepts about the shape of existence such as “logos” or “aletheia”.
In taxonomy Latin is used to provide
distinct forms, for philosophy Greek provides distinct concepts. When thinking
about Paul Pollaro’s work some years ago the word Chthonic, which means “hidden
under the earth”, came to mind as a way to encapsulate what his work is about.
He liked it. It may be a fallacy in this post-modern world to fall back on words,
which evoke essences. But it provides a ground for our thinking; in short a
topology, a place to stand on (understanding). So be it. I am not post-modern.
%2BMound%2BPoint%2B-%2BArmor's%2BGrace%2BII%2C%2B76%22%2Bx%2B81%22%2C%2B2013%2C%2B%2Boil%2Band%2Btar%2Bon%2Bpanel.jpg) |
| Paul Pollaro "Mound Point Armor's Grace" 2014 |
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| Mugar |
There is a mixture of buoyancy and alacrity in the phrase. There
is also a sense of sneaking off, shirking one’s duties. Both aspects apply to
the artists in this show; impatience with the status quo of art, and a letting
go of the topics we were told in school were the only route for a serious
painter. The artists in this show are New Englanders by choice or by birth, a
part of the country known as being overly civilized and cerebral. Tell anybody west of the Mississippi that you
come from New England and they will call you an abolitionist or expect you to
wear a three-piece suit. I heard from a carpenter who works winters in Arkansas
that they like to hire Yankees down there as foremen. They are good
taskmasters. We are hard on ourselves too, our own taskmasters. The artists in
this show inhabit the same rugged inner psychological terrain as the New
England poets such as Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell. Or artists like
Hopper, Hartley, Marin.
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| Susan Carr 2013 |
The original impetus for this show came from a message on Facebook
informing me that my painting accepted for the annual “Off the Wall” show at
the Danforth Museum last June was hung side by side with Susan Carr’s work. The
message said it was a fortuitous paring as both of us work our paint heavily
off the surface. I recalled her name from a show curated by Addison Parks in
the late Nineties at Crieger-Dane in Boston called “Severed Ear. (the poetry of abstraction)” that brought together the work of New York artists such as Richard
Tuttle and Leon Polk Smith with Boston artists such as Tim Nichols, Addison
Parks and myself. I went on to Facebook to look up Susan’s work. I could see
immediately why we were put side by side. A love of paint but more than that an
impulsion of the paint to reach out as though pushed by some energy not
constrained by logic. Chthonic seemed to apply here, except it was more the
thrust of molten lava than the earth itself.
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| Susan Carr |
To select the rest of the participants was not difficult. We
are all painters, a distinction that makes a difference these days and moreover
we all are in our own way artists who want to put back together what was torn
asunder in painting over the last fifty years. We don’t ignore the ideas that
motivated that deconstruction but work with them. There is a paring down of art
to bare essences in the Greenbergian ethos of painting. And it extends to the
point where artists start taking the very material and ground of the painting
apart. Where does it end? The work of Kelly, Stella, Ryman, Tuttle and Richter, artists I’d like to label as artists of the ‘bare minimum’, informs
our painting. They provide us with the
iconic shapes and notions of canvas as sculpture set free by their research
into the underpinnings of painting. But our plan is to do something different
to them.
So Huck Finn has to light out for new territory, out from the
concentration camps of the slave states. Among the artists in this show there
is a conviction that the terrain of Modernism that they grew up in, admired, studied
and accepted is not the endgame for painting and not to be rehashed ad nauseam.
All that was jettisoned from Minimalism: earthiness, anxiety, passion, affection,
mystery, magic, surprise, place and space the so-called attributes of the real
which were somehow secondary to concepts and ideas come back to haunt the work
of these artists. I once seemed perplexed about how personal experience came to
inform artwork. You spend time in nature, you move in it, dig in it, touch it
smell it, but where and how does it feed into the painting. Addison said it
does unbeknownst to you. It is absorbed through your pores, the accumulation of
days and nights inhaling the smells of autumn and one day haptically without
forcing the issue it pops up in your work. You just let go and it does its
magic. The touch and feel of being in the world rejected by the bright lights
of logic come back to haunt these painter.
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| Jason Travers "Illusion" Corot's Field 40"x65" 2014 |
Jason Travers turns “the bare minimum” into a question: ”Is
that all there is?” Can this earlier generation of artists proclaim once and
for all that an aesthetic broken into parts should be the last statement of
painting? For Travers working inside this tradition on panels of pure color or
value, each panel becomes an event created patiently over time of endless
strokes and marks like someone scratching to escape their enclosure, or
insisting that the analytic event that takes apart is important but not more
than the abiding presence of the human touch. The multiple panels and the
foregrounding of texture are his acceptance and participation in the thinking
of the “bare minimum” but at the same time the 19th century of
Turner or is it Ryder pops up in certain panels of Travers paintings in part as
nostalgia for a bygone world but hints with the slow time of the hand and touch
at new notions of time and terrain to light out for. But in the true spirit of
a Modernist he raises more questions than he answers.
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| Addison Parks"Wroots" 24"x18" oil on linen 2014 |
Addison Parks uses the tradition of abstraction literally as
a background for a foregrounded gestural event yet more recently he has
foregrounded the abstract pattern. He
acknowledges its role in giving to pure colors an iconic force. However, he
learned personally from Tuttle’s evolution as an artist that breaking down has
to be followed by putting back together. Tuttle, himself, was as much a maker
as a deconstructionist: But what forces us to put things back together is life
itself. Parks’s work asks in the end:
are we just scientists working isolated in our studio/laboratory? If we are
alive to nature, our family and those around us in the larger community, then our
art must reflect the constant merging and rearranging of our relationships. His
works are events, transitory moments of meaning where things fall into place.
But any arrangement no matter how ecstatic implies that true to life in the end
it can only be transitory.
 |
| Mugar |
In a recent blog post I discussed the possibility of painting
jumping out of the “enframent” of technology. The word was coined by Heidegger
to describe the domination of technology over our thinking about the world. If
one accepts the premise that much of modern art has been enframed by the
methodological notion of providing simple shapes that are easily recognizable, (Husserl’s
eidetic reductions) then the question could arise: how can you get back to the
garden where all the reductive parts find their whole again. I discussed this
issue in relation to my work and came up with the notion of waiting. Painting
not as a power play but as an opening up to possibility. When I began this body
of work now in its 15th year, I started not from reduction but
multiplicity, a field of colors. All that has initiated change in the work has
come about from questions such as: What happens when you use a frosting
applicator to create a gesture with volume and smooth surfaces? What happens
when you use letters instead of individual marks? The answer to this last
question has thrust my painting into the earth/world dichotomy, that Heidegger
established, moving it from the earth side of the equation to world side.
 |
| Paul Pollaro "A Light of Dark.Hyperbolic and Elliptical Graph "2015 |
Paul Pollaro’s work is in part about the dark light of
nature. Not the optical light that lights the world but the energy that radiates
from rocks and plants, something that you can pick up with infrared cameras. He
has succeeded in pushing the envelope of physicality but most recently the work
turned on him in a most unpredictable way. Like Travers and Parks the
self-awareness of the paintings presence and language comes from the artists of
the “bare minimum” and in particular Richter the master of paint as paint and
the canvas as sculptural presence. In his latest work the dichotomy of nature and
culture meet in a way that has allowed him to engage the same earth/world
dichotomy found in my work. It asks the question: are the abstract constructs
of the mind also nature?
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| Addison Parks"Well Being" oil on linen, 16"x20", 2014 |
In a blog post I wrote about the French painter Jean Helion,
I drew a parallel between his prison camp experience in Germany in WW11 that
reduced him to a raw unit of labor(arbeit macht frei) and the abstraction that
he rejected after the war. All he could think about besides trying to survive
during his confinement was the vibrancy of life in Paris. When he escaped and
came back to Paris, he abandoned abstraction and embraced figuration in the
form of paintings of people in urban settings. I thought of a parallel
evolution in style in the work of Stella and Held who abandoned the minimalist
trope of their early work to embark in their later years on multifaceted
paintings, where there was a complex relation between the parts and the whole. Jean
Helion was subjected to a physical and emotional “minimalism” by the Nazi’s.
Was the minimalism of abstract art a sort of scientific asceticism in some way
parallel to the emotional oppression of life in prison camp? The essence of this show speaks to the
primacy of life in the creative process and the topography of time that does
not try to crush the spirit but opens up islands to the stream. To borrow the title of Addison Parks’s novel:
”Love and Art, in that order”.
 |
| "Flotsam"Jason Travers |
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