David Row at Loretta Howard (Feb18-April 2)

The opening of a show in New York of David Row’s work at Loretta Howard concurrently with the Cheim and Read show of his mentor Al Held’s painting from the late 60’s, along with many superficial resemblances between the two, made it hard for me at first to shake Held’s hold on my interpretation of Row’s painting. But Row’s intent and intelligence only become clear when you understand their dissimilarity. 

Yield 1976

The show of Row’s painting  represents 40 years of work. The first painting in the show was done around 1976 or just about the time he graduated from the Yale MFA program. It is a small work of four panels, none the same size and each allotted a different color or value. One can imagine they were part of a series where he followed rules that dictated various permutations in the rule based world of Minimalism. A world of rectangles vs. squares, of whites vs. yellow. It is a working space that acknowledges how we use cognitive labels to order our world. This strategy of objects sharing some characteristics but not others continues throughout his career. I suspect that this early body of work was an apprenticeship that allowed him to separate his identity from that of his teachers at Yale, none of whom were Minimalists.

 

Nine below Zero 1993

His interest in painting not as perception but as cognition lifts him out of the visual language of Held, that functions in the early Sixties on the push/pull of figure/ground or in the late Sixties on the conflict of orthographic vs. perspectival vision. All of the above constructs are cognitive in the sense that they shape our visual world, but the perceptual always precedes in our understanding of things the higher level of semiotic signs and symbols, that seems to be the world that Row prefers to express himself in. Hence, the difficulty of interpreting a painting such as “Nine Below Zero”: At first glance it is reminiscent of the “Big N” of Held, with its figure/ground ambiguity but like Row’s earlier minimalism it is a “compare and contrast” of how the Zeros add up cognitively. One is black on white, the other white on black and create as byproducts in one panel a white lozenge in the other a black lozenge. The nine from the title I think refers to the nine squares created by a grid that underly each zero. Probably, more than any other work in the show it straddles the two realms of knowing; the realm of signs and symbols and the underpinnings of figure/ground where Held functions.

The introduction of the curvilinear into his work appears to be lifted from the late paintings of de Kooning.  To achieve an understanding of the Abstract Expressionist De Kooning, a notion of real physical gesture, which he uses to create time and space, is crucial. Interestingly, Row reduces this to a semiotic sign. Granted they are hand painted but he domesticates the heroism of de Kooning into a sign that is often contrasted with another sign such as the stable grid pattern in “Point of View.” However, when you realize that those swirling patterns represent a kind of irreducible signifier for movement, like the convoluted twists and turns of Chinese dragon painting, then, Row’s lifework becomes clearer and very interesting. He is really involved in the language of painting or better yet painting as language. 

Point of View 2001

The terrain was set for Row by Held, who always grounded his work in real visual constructs.With a similar imperative Row transformed the raw visual language of Held into semiotic constructs to keep his work intellectually grounded.  It is always the sign of genius that one can acknowledge the greatness of ones predecessors without imitating them. That sort of leap from the perceptual to the semiotic gives his work a dialectic rigor so as to avoid either the trap of Zombie Formalism, which tries to erase Modernism with commodification or the weak gestures held together by some sort of irony of Provisional painting. In our conversation about his work Row said he was always the serious student and implied that maybe he was too much so. Knowing the value of things takes a serious turn of mind. It allowed him to appreciate semiotically his progenitors, a word Beckett, a tradition obsessed writer loved to use, so as to take Modernism to another level of self-understanding.

 

Catskill 2014

Beckett's "Endgame", Robert Storr's and Addison Parks's recollections of Deyab's unique character and achievements

Addison Parks wrote an exquisite remembrance of Larry Deyab.

http://artdealmagazine.blogspot.com/2016/03/happy-birthday-larry-deyab-rest-in-peace.html?m=1


The essence of the painting by Larry Deyab is captured in this excerpt from Beckett’s “Endgame”.  Few artists can express the grimness of human existence. Goya is alone except for Deyab.

 HAMM: 

I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter—and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!

(Pause.)

He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.

(Pause.)

He alone had been spared.

(Pause.)

Forgotten.

(Pause.)

It appears the case is... was not so... so unusual.

Or Robert Storr's essay on his work is eloquent:

TAKE NO PRISONERS
Larry Deyab’s paintings come from a dark place. If you have not already seen it for yourself they will take you there. If you have you’ll immediately recognize where you are but see it as if for the first time through new eyes. That place has many names and its primary characteristics are also many as are the reasons for the differences among them. Those differences matter and we look to painting to help to distinguish them. For lack of a better word, though, and out of respect for tradition, let’s call this continent of disquiet Melancholia, though Baudelaire its greatest poet, preferred a term referring to the source of the humor – black bile – classically understood to be its cause; Spleen. As in the late works of Francisco Goya y Lucientes – “luciente” means bright, shining but the light in Goya is defined by contrast with its absence - blackness suffuses the atmosphere of Deyab’s imagery like toxic squid ink sprayed or spit out on the canvas. Frequently, though, that blackness fades to a heavy metallic grisaille that appears suffused with unspecified toxicities like the atmosphere of an all but barren planet, a planet that might well be our own a hundred years hence – or as things are now tending, much sooner. Deyab’s landscapes – virtually empty horizons, carbon trees against asphyxiating skies – reimagine the conventions of the Romantic sublime for use at the end of the world, recast the pathetic fallacy that nature bespeaks human emotions for that moment when humans have vanished from the face of the earth.
That noted History has already met Larry Deyab half way. More than half way! It is crowding him at very turn. And he is pushing back. Because he has a stake in how history turns out and how its tragedies are misunderstood in their unfolding. Of course we all do, but Deyab, who is of Syrian extraction, reads the daily headlines from the Middle East from a different perspective than the majority of native-born Americans. When we talk about “difference and diversity” in this country the dialogue tends to channel into well worn grooves cut by the ongoing catastrophe bequeathed to us all by slavery. But many waves of immigration followed that of the “founding fathers” who landed at Plymouth Rock, just as they followed those of slave ships docking in Atlantic and Pacific ports of call to supply labor to the Southern colonies and later the Southern states. Deyab’s family of these later transplantations, and it is with more recent and correspondingly vivid collective memory that he watches in horror at his adopted country blunders through the fog of war in Syria, Iraq, and beyond even as new refugees who might be part of his extended clan – the Family of Man – flee or attempt to flee from wars they did not want and from which they suffer more grievously than those who started them. Place names from that part of the world – Fallujah, for example, where mercenaries from the aptly branded Dark Ops squads of Blackwater were burned and then lynched on a bridge for crimes they did commit – is one of those places. Other pictures commemorate monsters from the region – for instance Sadam Hussein’s sadistic sons Uday and Qusay – or thugs from various other post-colonial zones of armed conflict in Asia (specifically Cambodia) and Africa (specifically Liberia), and spill over terrorism in Europe (in particular Munich and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.) Thus Deyab enters the ranks of contemporary history painters like Gerhard Richter, Leon Golub, Luc Tuymans who have updated Goya’s Disasters of War by showing the Disasters of Peace - or what goes by that designation in an era when “lesser” blood-letting is trumped by the prospect of nuclear annihilation – while eschewing all the tropes of valiant heroism and idealistic common cause characteristic of history painting prior to Goya.
Meanwhile some of Deyab’s emblems of horror are purely mythical – the vampire Nosferatu being one – or archetypal – demonic clowns, side show freaks fleshing out the roster. And some are Biblical, notably from the stations of the Cross a subject rare in contemporary art but a staple of painting in the pre-modern period and to that extent a symbol of Deyab’s challenge to the conventional post-modernist wisdom about what can and should be painted. It would seem that that in a world of daily martyrdoms on the evening news the flagellation of Christ, his crown of thorns, his struggle to carry his own Cross to Calvary are again relevant to some artists who are wholly of their time in every other respect, arguing that as metaphor these stories have yet to be exhausted. In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood her central character Hazel Motes is caught by his landlady mortifying his flesh with barbed wire around his ribs and pebbles in his shoes. When she admonishes him to stop stating that “People don’t do things like that anymore” he calmly answers her saying words to the effect “So long as I do, they do.” Deyab is such a painter.
It is ironic that many of these dark images are realized “en pleine aire,” specifically on the back porch of a triple decker house in Cambridge Massachusetts where Deyab grew up and to which he has returned to make his own after a long period in the rough and tumble of the New York art world where his circle mixed contemporaries and near contemporaries and cherished elders. In the latter category Milton Resnick, Pat Pasloff, and Ronald Bladen; in the former rising talents of his own generations or of those just slightly older than his, Julian Schnabel for one. Accordingly Deyab’s sense of artistic tradition is first rather than second hand or academic, and never a matter of nostalgia for a Golden Era he missed, but of a living connection to artists he admires.
Yet like any “son” of imposing fathers and mothers Deyab learned early that he did them no honor by trying to mimic the look of their work, which inevitably means doing the heroes work over again but less well and for the wrong reasons - or for no reason at all other that excessively deferential admiration and want of an independent identity and raison d’etre. Making one’s own way as an artist necessarily requires making it – the thing, the work - one’s own way. The first step in that direction is choosing one’s own tools and formats. This Deyab did by setting aside the tools of the past - tools he had mastered and effects he loved and thoroughly understood - and picking up others in tune with his times albeit visually dissonant in the context of the full-bodied painterly painting to which he was initially drawn and at which he excelled early in his career. Chief among them are commercial enamels and spray paint, which account for the unwelcoming, unyielding surfaces of his panels. Speaking of Van Eyck Willem de Kooning famously said “ flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” Foreswearing the hedonistic pleasures of that medium Deyab has opted for a raw, deliberately limited but for all that no less expressive choice of tools and materials, essentially those of taggers who inscribe their names and thoughts and fantasies on unprotected walls in public situations. Addressing the private anguish that public events inspire and showing viewers those things in a state of nakedness from which they would prefer to turn away, Deyab has chosen to be a painter entirely in and of the world – while it lasts. His pictures are hard to look at and harder still to ‘like” in a period when “liking” has become a finger tip reflex response to canned and spoon-fed feel good imagery of every description. I don’t like Deyab’s pictures but I take them seriously as they insist that I do and once seen I can’t forget them.
Robert Storr – 2015

"The Glory of the World" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and "Coney Island" at The Brooklyn Museum

OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THOMAS MERTON

When I first read in the “New York Times Magazine” that BAM was producing “The Glory of the World”, a play celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Thomas Merton’s birth, I thought it might revive my early and now somewhat lapsed interest in his work, which had  spun its magic on me when I first read “The Seven Storey Mountain”.  That narration of his inner and outer journey toward a conversion to Catholicism while a student at Columbia contained a yearning for truth that was reminiscent of my youthful desire to be an artist. His description of life in New York City evoked a mix of anxiety and hope typical of the difficult start of any journey that knows what it wants to leave behind but is not exactly sure of where it wants to go. His later works written after years as a Trappist monk attempt a fusion of Christian and Buddhist monasticism. He had observed that the meditation exercises in the Buddhist tradition in many ways were more refined and subtle than those of Christianity and sought to integrate them into the monastic tradition of the Church without changing the importance of  Christian notions of salvation. At a moment when his drift toward Eastern thought was picking up speed he died accidentally from electrocution due to bad wiring in a Thai hotel.

The play's story line, according to the “New York Times Magazine”s article, is a centennial birthday party with seventeen celebrants, who toast him and I imagined would try to reveal something about his inner life and contribution to many facets of his intellectual and spiritual life: Catholic, Buddhist, Communist and Taoist.

 I got my first warning that the play would be antithetical to my expectations prior to seeing the play from my daughter Eve , who is an actress in NY. A friend told her that her movement coach encouraged her to see it as  some of the scenes were wild and wonderfully choreographed. Originally performed in Louisville Kentucky, not far from the monastery where Merton lived as a Trappist monk, it was funded by a local philanthropist, who won millions of dollars in Power Ball and written by Charles Mee collaboratively with the director Les Waters of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. It starts out well enough with the director playing Merton in silence with his back to the audience framed with Merton’s sayings projected repeatedly on the walls to either side of him.

Actors in their Lazy Boys quoting Merton

Suddenly, the all male crew of actors breaks the silence when they burst onto the stage ready to celebrate. They are raucous and seem to function more as a group of bros than as individuals. As the celebration moves from scene to scene, it becomes clear that little wisdom will escape from their lips. In several scenes they quote famous mystics but before long find themselves spouting banalities about solitude originating from such pop icons as Lady Gaga and Christina Applegate. Some of the sayings seem not to mean anything at all, starting out with some weight but slipping quickly into absurdity. At times some of the men seem to distinguish themselves as older and wiser and I  anxiously waited to hear something of depth coming from their mouths but all ends up platitudinous. 

At one point a conflict erupts from the frustration experienced between two characters about some unrequited love, although we never get a clear sense of the origins of this misunderstanding. The couple resolves the conflict by dancing romantically to “The Street Where You Live” as the rest of the cast joins in  dancing in pairs cheek to cheek.

One critic of the play has asked why the playwright decided on an all male cast and suggests it may reference the all male life of the monastery that Merton lived in. Homoeroticism is not veiled in any way, especially in the aforementioned dance scene but also in the wild fight scene at the end of the play where one character threatens to insert a plunger in the buttocks of a naked man scurrying wildly around the stage.

Reginald Marsh

A major dichotomy in the play exists structurally between the solitary Merton and the undifferentiated mass of revelers. This dichotomy becomes heightened in the fight scene that meanders between food fight, orgy and prison melee until it reaches a crescendo of outright mayhem ending the play with the stage strewn with trash. It is said that Mee, a student of mythology, often uses Greek myth as the conceptual underpinning for his plays. In “The Glory of the World”, the actors start out playing shallow frat boys but devolve into Dionysian revelers. Although no murder is committed the energy generated by the fight scene, which lasts fourteen minutes, gets close to it. This fight scene raises a question: Do these seventeen characters represent the limited emotional and intellectual capacity of the world that Merton wished to escape by entering the orders? Their thoughts, as manifest by their shallow questioning and understanding of Merton, are a thin facade hiding their attachment to the world in its lowest common denominator of physicality. At one point the crowd breaks out into a body building show, where, except for the few actors who were probably not buff enough to participate, they try to out-flex each other to flaunt their masculinity. 

Image salvaged from Coney Island

I got some hunches about the play’s meaning, as I reflected on a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, that afternoon, prior to seeing the play, where I saw a totally engaging exposition of the history of Coney Island. It started with paintings of the beach from the early 19^th c, when it resembled Cape Cod, continuing to its heyday as the world capitol of mass entertainment in the Thirties, when there were three competing amusement parks, to its deterioration in the Sixties and Seventies and up to its almost complete demise in the  present. Its climax as the epicenter of mass hedonism seems embodied in the photo by Weegee of an overview of a massive horde of bathers in 1940 that was used as the basis of a funky collage by Red Grooms done in the 90’s. Another hunch came when I recalled a book of poems that I bought in college by Lawrence Ferlinghetti called “The Coney Island of the Mind”. A little research led me to Henry Miller who coined the phrase in order to capture iconically Coney Island as the epitome of the superficiality and crassness of mass capitalist culture. Of Coney Island he said:

WeeGee Coney Island 1940's

 “Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind. . . . In the oceanic night Steeplechase looks like a wintry beard. Everything is sliding and crumbling, everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters.”

Upon reading this, I intuited that there might be a parallel between Miller, who left America behind to pursue an almost spiritual pursuit of erotic exploits in France and Merton, who as a child followed his artist father and his father’s mistress to France, where he first encountered the glory of  French Catholicism. In so doing, intentionally or unintentionally as in Merton's case, they turned their back on the erotic identification of the individual with mass culture that was so poignantly evoked in the poetry of Walt Whitman and was a touchstone for so many artists such as Reginald Marsh, who is well represented in the Coney Island exhibit. For Miller sex was pursued with a religious fervor as a sort of vehicle for personal transcendence. For Merton it was religion in its concentrated monastic form that offered him a transcendence from the modern mass culture and also the personal suffering he experienced when his emotional life fell apart after World War Two, with the deaths of all his family members in particular his brother who was killed in the war.

Merton1951 

Maybe it is the fault of the play’s structure that the transcendent God that Merton encountered in his solitude as a monk is conveyed abstractly and weakly by the periods of silence that frame the play and in no way can function as a potent anti-dote to the shallow antics of the revelers. Even the quotes of Merton that are projected on the walls of the stage express his own doubts about knowing the sacred. In the end the exuberance of the birthday celebrants is such ecstatic good theatre (one critic imagines that future generations of theatre goers will see the fight scene as one of the great fight scenes of all time) one gets the impression that the playwright comes down on the side of the  boisterous physicality of the masses. Maybe that is the meaning of the play’s title. In writing this article I kept typing “The Glory of the Word”. No! This play is about the overwhelming glory of the world. If you came to learn more about the sounds of silence and transcendence in Merton’s life as a monastic you will be sorely disappointed.

This article expresses much of Merton's own struggle with the world

Ahab, the Pequod and Frank Stella at the Whitney

Frank Stella

It is interesting that Stella has a retrospective at the same time that  Zombie Formalism is reigning supreme in the contemporary art scene. The shadow of Stella’s early painting haunts their work and functions as a ground upon which these artists build their imagery. But it is not a ground with which they engage in a dialogue or agonic surpassing but a blatant copying. Whereas Stella’s work cut itself away from the Cartesian doubt of most Modernism and cut out for itself a role of being emblematic of the modernist and positivistic hegemony of America triumphant, the Zombie Formalists express a sort of redundancy where the present keeps repeating itself in a circular loop: Stella ad infinitum.

Sarah Morris

Mark Grotjahn

Stella makes it easy for abstractionistas to fall back on his work as a formula for “abstraction making”, in that he already excised color and form from their grounding in the perception of reality. Instead of a panoply of color that works dynamically out of the complexity of color perception, he uses a rules based strategy limiting their number and form as though pre-selected from a color-aid pack. This simplicity of color choice goes hand in glove with a simplicity of form. Moreover, his self-consciousness early on about the shape of the rectilinear canvasses’ relationship to the forms conveyed within, leads easily to taking the form making from the canvasses shape. Again,, it is his ignorance, willed or otherwise, about how colors interact with each other that frees him up to deal with the canvas as abstract form. I recall years ago meditating on his black canvases and realized that this absence of any activity of push and pull between colors resulted in the objectification of the canvas leading to the canvas beings perceived as a shape on a white wall. Object among other objects, including the humidity meter.  An absence of a metaphysical pointing out from the canvas to another realm keeps the canvas in a pragmatic world of just being a physical shape on the wall.  You can see this same strategy pursued by Ellsworth Kelley, who eventually deconstructs the support reinforcing its materiality, which is not the road Stella goes down. He could have gone there but for the haunting of the majesty of Baroque painting that turns him toward a pursuit of complexity and expansion off the wall out into space. He identified more with the overweening confidence of those Baroque artists than with the self-reflexive doubt that motivated the early Modernists. The artists of Rome had the majesty and power of the Church to buoy them up. Stella had the absolute domination of a positivist scientific world view promulgated by the most powerful nation in the world to launch him into an enormous expending of materiel.…

Frank Stella

An understanding of the relationship of Stella to his own antecedents is clarified by studying his influence on his descendants, the Zombie Formalists. Stella and the Zombie Formalists ignore core aspects of their sources. Stella abandons the optical self-reflection that formed the core of Mondrian’s artistic progress in order to use color as just shapes to play with. Within the paintings of the Zombie Formalists any notion of play found in Stella is abandoned so as to foreground a ghostly use of Stella as commodity. Interestingly enough, working backward hermeneutically from the dry commodification of the Zombies, the playful aspect of Stella in contrast seems to become a more salient aspect of his work. It is as a whole the product of "homo ludens" and is therefore more optimistic and out of sorts with the cold cynicism of the zombie zeitgeist. The retrospective seemed out of sync on so many levels with our times and lead me to understand why even the goofy playfulness of  Koons has to be couched in postmodern cynicism to be successfully marketed in this day and age.

Frank Stella

Derrida coined the term hauntology (a play on ontology) to express how the past informs the present in a post-ideological world. The enormous crucial battles of civil and individual liberation are over; there is just the road of ever more efficient technological functioning and communication. Heroic notions of humanity or the working class fade away as an ever more wired society keeps mankind integrated into the mechanism of the industrial state. Since the priority of this state of being is ever more efficient functioning, it is in its interest to obliterate any connection to the past that could slow it down. Although other modes of being that once existed come back to “haunt” the present, and we can try them on or play around with them, they do not define our essential mode of being in the world. Or maybe they can only be recycled in the current cynical mood as Stella has been by the zombie formalists or as John Currin does with the style of the populist Thomas Hart Benton.  The goal is to empty them of meaning so that ultimately private domains once explored in painting cannot escape being mechanized or function ever again as possible sources of individual self-realization.

"The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam" Frank Stella 1993

Melville’s story of the great white whale is often seen as a study and critique of capitalism. Ahab is only interested in his private quest and is clever and manipulative enough to convince his crew to go along with him. Melville is somewhat ambivalent about the morality of this exploitation as he feels we all exploit someone below us even as we are exploited. In my reacquaintance with the book several years ago what struck me was that the crew and Ahab are two different species of mankind. The crew is close to its surroundings ever ready so as to react to changing circumstances. When a sailor is knocked overboard on the shuttle out to Nantucket, Queequeg without prompting jumps into the icy November waters to save him. The crew creates bonds among each other instinctively knowing that their survival depends on being a band of brothers. They feel the palpability of the world as much as Ahab ignores it. For him everything is metaphysically abstract and involves goals that move the crew toward a denouement far from the practical goals of whaling.

There is an analogy I would like to attempt between Ahab's distance from the real and Stella's ignorance of any relationship to the long optical tradition of Western painting. The world is experienced by the crew of the Peqoud with a hands on feel for the things and events around them. For Ahab the world is not experienced in its praxis but is manipulated and ignored in the way Stella’s colors are abstract in the worst sense, derived from color-aid packs, not the way color is experienced in the eye as in Bonnard, Matisse or Cezanne. Stella has left artistically the sensuality of being in the world behind in order to fulfill what he sees as his manifest destiny to occupy more and more space. His formal affects are not achieved as for example in the work of Al Held, but imposed as he piles patterns on top of patterns. This  analogy of Ahab's delirium to Stella’s lack of grounding in the sensual is weak in only one sense: Stella does not live up to the the degree of Ahab's ascetic delirium. The journey he takes us on is neither majestic nor exhilarating. There is no hint at the void that lies under all of his exploits. At most Stella is a good engineer. Ben Davis in his spot on review of the show mentions a thesis Stella wrote at Princeton. Its bearing on his achievement is interesting to mention:

In that long-ago Princeton theses on Pollock and Celtic ornament, Stella claimed that the formula for "art" was pushing decoration to the point where it transcended itself. The knotted pyrotechnics of these final pieces certainly do that—it's actually hard to think of a space where they would work as passive décor. It's just that the direction they transcend decoration towards is the domain of theme parks and Broadway bombast. That is, spectacles built not to savor but to stun, not for connoisseurs but for visitors passing through.

The title of Davis’ essay is “All Style no Substance”. It raises questions about what is substance, what is substantial. The word can be better understood if broken down into “what stands under”. A meditation on what is substantiality and its relation to Stella’s work would be of interest to the connoisseurs and would make an engagement with the work of Stella worth their while if his work were at all engaged in that questioning itself. To savor such a discussion would be to linger, not to pass through.

* an interesting discussion is taking place here: on Henri Art Mag

strange article from 1964 in the New York Times seeing the Nihilism of Stella https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/16/archives/the-new-nihilism-art-versus-feeling.html