Reality and Desire, Armenians as outsiders and Phillip Morris

Is it just laziness or is it just more honest to find the world lacking than to imagine it fulfilling ones dreams. I follow on Twitter quotes from “Moby Dick” that seem to reinforce the sense of the disconnect between dream and reality, the ephemerality of things coming and going, appearing/disappearing. A sailor on a calm day stationed on the mizzenmast loses balance and falls into the sea never to be seen again. Or the crew of the Pequod losing all sense of self-determination at the hands of Ahab: helping to fulfill Ahab’s dreams, whose own utmost dream that they are embroiled in, is nonetheless left unfulfilled.

The strange interface between desire and reality is worth meditating on. For the nexus to work it seems that one has to dumb down both reality and desire. The reality of Facebook and Twitter probably encapsulate a space where one can imagine a “like” to one’s opinion to be self-reaffirming.

I wonder as I read about the current political currency of Right and Left and having to adjust my opinions based on the latest revelation of who did what to whom or in the case of one candidate just forgot to do period, I don’t know what is fact or fiction, everything seems to be mediated. Are the Russians manipulating the news or is it Soros or the Koch brothers. Can I base my self-worth on having opinions about something that may or may not be real? But it is the tissue that ties me to the world. Do I exist without out it? According to the political theorist Carl Schmitt an intellectual admired by the Right and Left we are pure political animals hungering not so much to be for something as in need of an enemy.

But there are some things that transcend this mediated reality. Before reality’s waxing and waning, its sudden contretemps and pirouettes, comes the personality of the observer and that personality has a history in its ancestry. The mediation of reality comes from a historical predilection to engage or not in the public realm. To know what I can control and what is beyond my control. I am still startled to this day by a comment made in conversation by an Armenian after the funeral of his brother in law, my good friend William A. Henry 111, a journalist and author who died in his early forties. As Armenians, he stated, we will always be outsiders. The principal of a large public school in Rhode Island, he was as far as I could tell successful in his occupation.  The details of what prompted the conversation escape me as the conversation took place more than 20 years ago. I recall relating it to my cousin who, like myself, is half Armenian. She is involved in and founded several charities one directed toward Armenia, another purely directed toward the US, which brings her in contact with the Country Western musicians who perform at her fundraisers. No one would appear more integrated into American culture than her. Yet she was in total agreement and seemed interested in pursuing the topic later but probably as many years have gone by since that conversation as have transpired since I spoke with the Armenian school principal and we have not picked up where we left off. But that notion of estrangement resonated within me and was a sort of confirmation of that estrangement from the dominant culture that was continually reinforced by anecdotes from family history: a sense, in short of an outsider looking in at something at core alien to itself.  Oddly the most poignant one comes from my mother’s side of the family. They were Germans living in the woods of NH and from stories my mother told harshly discriminated against by the Yankee natives. It was assumed that as immigrants they had no right to vote although they were in fact American citizens forcing my grandmother at one point to go to the state capitol to get proof of their citizenship. My father related numerous stories where he observed a sharp line between his cultural upbringing and that of the Yankee aristocracy that lived on the other end of Huron Ave in Cambridge.He enjoyed reminding me that even if they had more money than he did they did not know how to eat properly.

My Mother and Armenian Friends in NH circa 1933

The house's reincarnation in a "chic" neighborhood of Providence RI
Its name came from a Billy who lived there on the pond so as to distinguish him from a relative called Hillbilly

In the recent film “Spotlight” portraying the expose by the “Boston Globe” of the sexual predation by priests of the Catholic church on adolescents, the lawyer an Armenian, pursuing the diocese on behalf of the victims could have followed a path that let the Church deal on its own with its problems internally. As an outsider and from a people who were persecuted by a hegemonic regime, he identified with the victims of this horrific injustice. He felt compelled to bring the perpetrators out from under the shelter of the church into the harsh light of the criminal justice system. Was it a memory of how Armenians were treated by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire that haunted him? Being a stranger in one's own land was brilliantly portrayed in Elia Kazan’s “America America”. Kazan conveys vividly how nothing could be done to right the injustices imposed by the Ottoman Turks on the Armenians and Greeks, so absolute was the control they had on their ethnic minorities, short of outright revolution. When the main character, an Anatolian Greek, inadvertently gets involved in a conflict with the Turkish authorities on the side of a revolutionary Armenian group, his father has to solicit the help of his contacts in the government to get his son freed from prison. It is a kind of slavishness, which was the only way to survive in an oppressive society. This acquiescence was not the route pursued by the Armenian lawyer. As my Armenian grandmother said to the foreign-born husband of a woman she had taken into her apartment to protect her from his abuse:” This is America. Women are free!” The Catholic Church despite many of its still liberating credos and tenets remained Medieval as an institution in its top down control over its followers. It had been a touchstone for Catholic immigrants themselves persecuted by the Protestant majority in America but as it gained acceptance and power within the society as a whole it succumbed to the exploitation of those it was supposed to serve.

 

Stavros and Hovanness in "America America" 1963

I remember being startled in a conversation with a Navajo at a craft store in Arizona that indicated he felt that we were not standing on the same cultural platform.  The interlocutor showed his disdain for me not in words but by ending our conversation, which seemed to be going quite smoothly, rather abruptly. In so doing, he seemed to say or so it seemed, that although we were both American citizens there was a difference in our American experience. I am sure it was nothing in particular that I said but a feeling that he was sharing too much with me as an outsider about his life. Would it be any different if I were chatting with a Turk about both coming from Anatolia until we realized that the experience of my ancestors at the hands of his ancestors was nothing he wanted to acknowledge. And most likely he would have been indoctrinated to see me as an age-old archenemy.

I had a friend of pure WASP ancestry, descended from a world of country clubs, tennis whites and a notion of where to live and how to properly behave in society (a domain where I was always falling short to his chagrin). Whenever the stock market would collapse, he would admonish me to invest in Phillip Morris. He confessed that this was the stock of preference of the aristocracy. If you look at this chart you will see it has almost doubled since 2014 and even now offers a dividend yield close to 4%. In this yield starved economy where the pensioner, who put his money in treasuries is getting close to zero percent this is extraordinary. Why bother with hot tech stocks when you can invest in the exploration of new markets for nicotine in the Third World. Of course I never took his advice because it was hard for me to understand that some things are absolutely true and incontrovertible. For me reality is only in the end doom and gloom and genocide. But if there are enough people with money out there to say something is safe it is naïve to think otherwise.

It is also naive to think we all judge others from some universal point of view. Nietzsche talked about the creation of human types over millennia. Max Weber felt that Capitalism was the outcome of the Protestant work ethic and Melville sees it at work in the Quaker Ahab for whom the metaphysics of good and evil underlie his capitalist quest to such a degree so as to usurp the tallying of good and evil solely in terms of money. And now I understand that country club membership and the facades of beautiful homes in enclaves like Annisquam, Massachusetts ,where reality and desire meet, are paid for from dividends from Phillip Morris.

"Shake and Bake" aesthetics in contemporary abstraction

When I first stumbled into the "Revivalism" of Abstract Painting in NY via an article by Alan Pocaro on Provisional painting in the British art blog “Abstract Critical”, I must admit it was a breath of fresh air to see that installation and conceptual art were not the only art being produced in the City. It led to my writing about provisional painting and becoming embroiled in the labeling of Zombie Formalism. Since the early 2000’s I have been laboring on my non-representational painting in New England and found few fellow travelers in this cultural backwater with whom to share my ideas. Last year I gathered together two former students, who work abstractly, Paul Pollaro and Jason Travers, a friend Addison Parks, whose work I had followed since we first showed together at Creiger -Dane in Boston and Susan Carr, who once showed with me and Addison in group show at Creiger-Dane. I had hoped I would succeed in drawing some attention to our work as a sort of Northern outpost of what was happening in NY. Addison had attempted something similar but more comprehensive in Boston in the late 90’s with a group show at Joyce Creiger’s gallery in which he included his work, Susan Carr's and my work side by side with the an earlier generation of artists including Richard Tuttle, Porfirio DiDonna, Louise Fishman, Leon Polk Smith and Milton Resnick. The show called “Severed Ear” attempted to define a trail of abstraction that was deconstructive of the authoritative work of the Modernist ethos in the same way as provisional painting but with less focus on irony and more of a focus on the lived life of emotions.

Notions of authority keep cropping up in regards to the evolution or devolution of abstraction. Where did this sense of High Modernism being incontrovertible come from, so as to become a lodestone that would define an unassailable high point in American art. In a slugfest with the English sculptor Robin Greenwood on Mark Stone’s Henri Art magazine, we both agreed that there was something lacking in the contemporary iterations of modernism. He thought Matisse was hard to surpass and I was more sympathetic to the work of the Minimalists. The discussion revolved around notions of spatiality and its lack in Provisionalism and Zombie art. Robin seemed to think that spatiality is crucial to great painting. In my attempts to grapple with these issues I recalled a notion of eidetic reduction from my readings of Husserl. In this philosophers attempt to ground our perceptual world in something solid, he focused on the apprehension of the outside world in our mind. It was very Cartesian and is something that comes to mind when I get my hearing tested and I am asked to distinguish pure sounds. In a hearing test we scientifically break the web of hearing and cognition into its separate parts and define its ranges in order to evaluate the condition of the auditory organ. It is similar to the way that abstraction breaks down the visual world into pure colors with ranges from warm to cool, grounded in our retinal view of seeing. The world is captured and analyzed in our reduced apperceptions of it. I think it was this connection between science as the only true knowledge and art at mid-century that hoisted abstraction to its cultural centrality. To paraphrase Hegel’s words: abstract art was the century captured in thought.

Petersen

If the hold on art by science is so total then we have to see any attempt to break that hold as being dialectically related to it. It is this dialectical relation, which allows critics to talk about Zombie formalism for example. There is no inherent value in zombie art except as an attempt to excise from itself any authoritative metaphysical grounding in knowing and science. Without science it becomes a pure commodity retaining however its commercial exchange value. By the same token “Provisionalism”” as defined by Rubinstein or “Casualism” by Sharon Butler have value as attempts to break the bonds of aesthetic purity and ironically refer back to the laid back devalued creator as incapable of any authoritative statements.

Behnke

Abstract art that falls outside of the parameters of provisional and zombie art I think is often hard to talk about in so far as it lacks the dialectical relation to classical abstraction. This was the problem with a show I recently came across on "Painters Table" of abstract art, entitled "If Color Could Kill” that is currently hanging at Vassar College. By insisting in the title on the aesthetics of color it places itself outside of the commodification of zombie art and the irony of provisional abstraction. Especially in the work of Paul Behnke there is, in his play of pure color and abstract patterns, an attempt to move back into the language of Matisse where color relations create aesthetic moods of pleasure. Few of the other artists are as rigorous in the analysis of color except for Gary Peterson, who brings an Al Held notion of compressed space without Held's ambiguity of flat vs deep space. They are both artists who don’t mind not obscuring their roots. Their influences are obvious as is the case for the rest of the artists in the show, where for example you see Elizabeth Murray all over Benson and Moyse. It is good to be influenced and to live with those influences and see where they take you. How these influences pan out over time will be interesting to see. But at this point there is none of the anxiety of influence typical of the struggling young artist and only from what I can see on line there is a whole lot of shakin and bakin going on.

Moyse

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