"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.

#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.

#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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

Artists left to right:Parks,Mugar,Travers and Pollaro(Susan left earlier)

It is commonplace to think of Abstract Art as solely work of the imagination and fantasy and Realism because it represents recognizable things as well! Real. But we have to ask: What is reality? Big questions that we don’t ask ourselves everyday but they have to be asked and are asked by the artists in this show. Just to ask it means there initially has to be more than one answer. Another way of putting it is as follows: How is the world we live in shaped. If we turn on the TV and watch our favorite sitcom it will no doubt be staged in a living room, a kitchen or an office, enclosed spaces where a small group of people exchange quips and repartee that remind us enough of your own life to keep us glued to the screen. This constrained world where we recognize ourselves most easily is the one we live in for the most part at home with family and friends or at work with colleagues and this is the world that is most often depicted in Realistic painting. But if one steps back from this conventional arrangement of people and things and ask how is this scene transmitted to our eyes in the first place, how is it shaped by us into a believable world, then we enter into the world that Abstract Art is better suited to depict.

                                                     
                                              Click here for: "Video of shows details"

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 

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

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.

Paul Pollaro "Mound Point Armor's Grace" 2014

Mugar

“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.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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 19^th 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.

 

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 15^th 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?

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