Lorraine Shemesh and the impossibility of the Romantic

Where we are currently in the cultural history of ideas is hard to pin down. Ex post facto is always easier. The past has already been packaged and defined by countless historians but the present as it evolves into the future is hard to fix and if we try to paste the past on the present we get into a lot of trouble. It seems to work momentarily like assuming Trump is Hitler or the removal of a statue of Columbus from a college campus is akin to the destruction of a Buddhist statue by the Taliban. But is the past really so well categorized and no longer open for discussion. This struck me when I wrote about a visit I made to Edwin Dickinson on Cape Cod in 1970. After I had seen his work at the Biennale in Venice in 1968, I found myself encouraged by his love of the observed world to persevere in my pursuit of realism in the context of the overwhelming dominance of High Modernism in mid-century America. However, in my more recent analysis of his work I noticed that his phenotype was more 19^th century than 20thc and from the perspective of where we stand now seemed to float further and further into the past like some flotsam and jetsam thrown into the wake of a steamship until it is irretrievable and disappears out of sight. And I would add that if such a person were to live in our day and age he or she would be so out of  sync with the prevailing zeitgeist they would most likely go insane.

Dickinson

The most salient characteristic of Dickinson is artist as observer. Not an observer who looks coldly at the world but one who seeks to be at one with what he sees. He takes an anti-solipsistic stance where like Stevens in his great poem “Idea of order at Key West” Dickinson interweaves the self and nature. And most importantly Dickinson’s persona yearns for a meaning to one’s life on earth, a romantic ache for for a meaningful story on the world's stage.  It has a strong narrative bent where he is an actor in his own play. Not Beckett but Shakespeare with a beginning, middle and denouement. I have talked elsewhere of the deconstruction of the strong self at the hands of the deconstructionists or the supremacy of things a la Duchamp or the cosmic melding of self and society from Hegel where we are always mediated by being part of society. This is where we are currently in our world of art, a place where in in an essay on Jed Perl’s criticism I expressed the idea that we have been turning around in circles for quite some time. At the end of history there are no more mysterious unknowns ahead of us to conquer. We are surrounded by all the detritus of society that is circling around an immense black hole. As it circles around we are totally unaware that is slowly sinking into the abyss.

Recently, I sent out images of my new work to several names on my email list.  A few thoughtful replies came back acknowledging that the color of the new work was richer and more evocative. An unexpected reply came from Lorraine Shemesh whom I met , when we both studied at the BU Summer program in Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1969. Phillip Pearlstein was the artist in residence and several well-known New Realists came to visit most notably Al Leslie. There was a lot written about the New Realists in the art press at the time, which peaked with a cover story in Newsweek in 1970 featuring a painting by Bill Bailey on the cover. Two years later he would be my senior project advisor at Yale. Another fellow student at Tanglewood, Paul Dinger arranged a visit to Leslie’s studio in NYC after the program ended for an article in the art magazine “Boston Review of the Arts”,  that he had recently founded. Probably for the only time in my life I felt as an artist part of a movement.

Shemesh

Shemesh shows at the Allan Stone gallery in New York. Judging from the images in the two catalogs she sent me, she is clearly well trained in the tradition of classical painting as it was taught at BU where she got her BFA in 1971. The first catalog is a retrospective of her work, which culminates around 2009 with her iconic pool paintings that have evolved from swimmers at the surface or just below to a view of their now faceless bodies and body parts totally submerged. Whereas the earlier painting retained the notion of an observation of swimmers in a recognizable setting, the latest work puts the observer in with the observed. She does not rely on a romantic search for connections between herself and the environment that allows Dickinson to overcome his solipsistic isolation but conveys rather the inability to jettison the self in such a liquid realm. Of course to swim casually in a non-competitive manner implies the desire of the swimmer to enjoy being buoyed up by a warm and caressing world similar to the amniotic fluid that supports a fetus.  Shemesh retains a strange, almost awkward, disconnect between the possibility of a merger between the water and the physical hardness of the body that resists it. There is built into her work the impossibility of the kind of cosmic explosion of the self of a Pollack or the a priori connection one finds in Dickinson or for that matter the poems of Walt Whitman.  I think that this is inherited from her realist background but also from the edgy postmodernist zeitgeist of the New York scene. I find myself using the word impossible again as I did in the essay on the play at BAM on Thomas Merton that stated unambiguously  the impossibility of transcendence in a world awash in physical drives and passions. Or the word incommensurable to express the distance of paint and meaning when I wrote about a show I had with Paul Pollaro at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston. 

Shemesh 

Visiting a John Walker show at Nielsen: Newbury St. Nostalgia from 2005 and 2008

                     A day in the Boston Art Scene 2005

John Walker "Seacake"

After circling the Back Bay for at least ten minutes a solitary parking spot at last presented itself not far from the Nielsen Gallery where we planned to see the new John Walker show. It was on a street that had to be cleared by 4p.m. for the commuter rush traffic. We assumed we would be out of Nielsen by then. It is a bargain with the devil, so to speak, when there is nothing else to be had on Newbury St, to be tempted by those empty spots. The price you pay if you overshoot 4pm is to have your car towed by some ex-con who'll extort a hefty sum from you as well as put a dent in your car. Probably best to pay for the garage at the Pru, but the convenience of being near the Nielsen gallery  trumps the risk.

At the gallery we found both Nina Nielsen and John Baker around the front desk and it appeared in a jovial mood. They admitted to having just finished a good meal at Louis's accompanied by an excellent wine. John Wronoski, at whose bookstore we had spent the morning perusing and purchasing signed first editions was introduced. Addison and I tried to convey what we had just experienced at his home/business, that left me close to hyperventilation before the signatures of the some of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy and literature. Somewhat similar to the" guess who I saw" syndrome when you encounter on the street someone who only existed for you in the movies-- we were beside ourselves with excitement.Books by Musil, Celine, Hamsun ,Nietzsche, Hegel all signed by the authors and often given to equally important individuals, e.g. a copy of" The Waste Land" signed by T.S. Eliot to Paul Valery. Time for a moment was "not" as all history collapsed into a kind of cosmic cocktail party where characters from different eras were taken off the shelves to rub shoulders. The most impressive find among many was a manuscript of Kazantzakis's poem "The Odyssey" hand written by the author that looked in its perfection as though God had dictated it to him first draft requiring no corrections.

Nina was more open today; which is not to say that she is usually not open but typically reserved before the needy artists who frequent her gallery (but thankfully not smug like most gallery owners). To their credit both of them are unique in their ability to get excited about the work they exhibit, talk with visitors about the work meaningfully and see it as something accessible not emblematic of some cultural superiority, an attitude prevalent in NYC, where the dealers and the artist exist in some" lofty" space beyond the viewer and both have pulled the ladder up behind them.  This was their temple and they the priests and in such a context one rarely expresses doubt. They were more than just interested in discussing the work; behind the questions about what we thought about Walker's work there was some trepidation which lead to questions about the meaning of life and made me believe that these paintings, which created a kind of twilight world, once entered into, did not allow for an easy return back to our diurnal world. What should have been a cathartic experience, which allowed the viewer to find strength in the encounter with the void, had put the usually confident gallery owners in a state of fear and trembling. 

Walker is literally trying to embrace the very sorrow that afflicts him; expressed through his use of real mud taken from the Maine mud flats near where he paints. Pictorially, all the paintings are similar: recognizable objects have fallen away, a wisp of light lingers on the horizon which is always at the top of the picture plane. Engulfing the viewer in the lower two thirds of the painting are the mud-flats which are indistinguishable from the dark of night..I can't decide which of the following messages he wishes to convey: is it a mud bath and therefore healing or night and quick sand that allows "no exit." Or a biblical lamentation about our mortality with a kind of from mud to mud refrain. As the trajectory that leads from natality wains mortality has the upper hand. This is clearly work about the downward slope of the cycle. 

I remember once seeing a show by one of his protégées which is very similar in style and content though ultimately Johnny Walker Red to Johnny Walker Black. I thought of titling the show "Low Tide Languor;" that meditative space on the beach at slack tide where you dwell on your place in the natural cycle of birth and death. The mood is often one of sweet acquiescence which lends itself to lyricism and is the favorite of poets who intone in that elegiac manner that can turn any words no matter how banal into "poetry." In the case of Walker you have the low tide, the retreat of life but you sensed that this is not passive acquiescence. He's in crisis; the tide is coming and it will not bring him back to the shore. Is the best strategy at this stage to embrace the twilight, to exult in the forces that limit man as part of our human condition. I guess I left with more questions than answers. But whatever the ultimate meaning of the work there was no doubt in my mind that Nina and John were now engulfed in the painting's crepuscular light.

The conversation took an interesting turn when Nina, who had already mentioned Camus as relevant to Walker, tried to see her artists as deconstructionists, implying that there ultimately was no difference between existentialism and the more recent deconstructionist movement out of France. At the time I couldn't respond in a meaningful way but it appeared misguided. If we see both existentialists (e.g.Sartre) and deconstructionists (e.g.Derrida) as undercutting the primacy of thought and reason (the cogito ergo sum of Descartes)as a basis for man's identity, then they are similar. And Nina is right. However, the deconstructionists doubt the whole nexus of being and nothingness which in a general sense is the subject of Walker's painting, and see it as just another attempt to resurrect and dramatize the over-inflated Western ego, which they are trying to rout out wherever they find it. Abandon the whole project all together, they seem to say. Walker wont abandon that project; he stays close to it-quaking before his inevitable extinction. A strong poet to borrow Harold Bloom's term, he faces and drinks deeply of that" dark night" with courage.

The artist at Nielsen that intrigues me most is Profirio DiDonna...He was neither an existentialist, a deconstruction, nor a rationalist but god forbid he believed there is a kind of logos, just the way which things line up and connect.It has a tentative quality to it , that the dots create a kind of order but not a hardwired one like Mondrian. It were as though he was listening to the order, letting it waft over him or better yet trying to touch it dot by dot. Or just expressing a kind of belief that it is there, which is Addison's take on him. Of course I feel closest to him as an artist. In his earlier work of vases there is an energy hovering around the object, something shaping it caressing it. It is a mystical insight . I remember once my daughter at the age of five when we encountered a dead bird in a park in Italy said not to worry because God was holding it in the palm of his hand. It also akin to certain theosophical ideas about forces both etheric and astral that support our physical being.

Joan Snyder interests me as well. In her work she has created a self that is prickly and difficult; sort of like the selves of Beckett's "Endgame" who devoid of hope still have a snarly desire to survive(though I just noticed in the recent "Art in America" that her new work is dealing with tears and sorrow). It was as though she was telling the deconstructionists that there is a solid core to the self and it is indestructible, especially when pushed into a corner-- it strikes back and bites. I remember first meeting her at Yale where she came as a visiting artist. She came to my studio as she was making the rounds of all the MFA candidates studios. On the floor I had tossed a drawing of a dead blue jay I had found on my doorstep. She proclaimed that it was the first authentic work she had seen at Yale. Something that dealt with feelings and not some over-weening ambition to make Al Held clones. She was supposed to stay a semester and quit the next week. A woman of her convictions.

The conversation which had broken off into groups and was already past those first emotion-filled moments suddenly came to an end  when I realized it was four o'clock and our car full of signed first editions was about to be towed. I did an about face and hurdled down Newbury St, putting my out of shape body to the test to witness the car in front of me being towed off. My car had  yet to be ticketed. Sometimes one has to pay tribute to the trolls for intellectual musings beyond the ordinary. Today would not be one of those times. We stayed above the fray. 

MARTIN MUGAR Durham,NH(2005)

PAINTING SURVEY
1970 - 2008 

Nielsen Gallery, BostonMarch 1 - April 5, 2008

Charred, ashes, a swath of detritus spread across miles and miles of a scorched earth, flotsam and jetsam littering a muddy shore, left behind by the tide or a storm, it doesn’t matter. The elephant in the room, the desperate inner child, the man on fire; these all come to mind standing in the glow or wake or shadow of John Walker’s always epic and often towering paintings. On the other hand we get the kind of chalky radiance of frescoed starlight, the closest thing to Giotto these eyes have seen in this world, in this place, in this muddy messed up twenty-first century where less and less is what it seems, where real, the real, is anathema and truth is a joke, scoffed at, ridiculed, kicked in the gutter. And for what?

That’s probably what John Walker would like to know. Can anyone tell him? Instead he’s getting hammered, a hammer the size of a wrecking ball, driving him into the ground, driving a shaft the size of a tree trunk down his throat, telling him that lies are truth and shit is fresh cream.

These many years, these many paintings, tell this story. The call of starlight; the promise of starlight. The shit/mud/magma/primordial ooze that we stand in as we look to the stars. The shit/mud/magma/primordial ooze of a species that cares only about outward things, about power and pretense and position and posturing and primacy and prestige. That pees on everything. He is holding up a mirror. He is holding up a lamp. A lighthouse on the distant shore. Yes, it is shit. Embrace the shit if it brings you closer to the earth. Lie down in it. Lie down in darkness. But look to the heavens. Look to our better selves. Look for salvation and light.

John Walker carries his paintings in his paintings along with everything else in his life. They are of course part of his story, part of his personal mythology, so why wouldn’t they be there. Bits of shapes, words, figures of sorts that reference the things that matter to him, scars from loss and from experience, like falling from a tree or being scorned by a loved one or being bitten by a snake; and wrinkles on our face, smiles or frowns, that we get from what life washes onto our shores or rains down on us. These are all there in the paintings; relics, touchstones, stains, souvenirs, heirlooms, mementos. All the things that shape his life.

There are also his beliefs, his dreams, his hopes, his heartbreaks. It is a kind of world according to John Walker. Not much different from what we get from every artist, really, but today we’re talking about him. Because he has been there, been around, from Birmingham to Melbourne and back again. Because he has been painting and hanging it out there and leaving his mark and defying the odds and getting up and getting knocked down and getting back up again and painting and painting and painting. And it is all in the paint; trapped in its amber, laid out on its mud flats, singing its song, for all who will listen whether we're listening or not!

The first time I saw one of his paintings was almost thirty years ago. Circa 1979. A painter friend of mine and I were looking through a gallery window. A closed gallery somewhere in downtown New York. This is what I remember. We were awed by his painting. We knew his work and he was already legend. The painting was one of the monument shape series. The sort of erect phallic obelisk in the landscape that looks like something broken, at once organic and geometric. It was a figure/ground of sorts. Figure in a landscape. He wasn’t the only person doing this at that time. Other painters come to mind. But it was almost like a sculptor’s painting. Strong, powerful, solid. And yet it was also abstract. Fiercely abstract. Fiercely ephemeral. Real bravado paint; juicy, sensuous, wet, flying. Constable/Turner meets Brancusi/Stonehenge. Again, landscape and figure--horizontal and vertical. Don Quixote's windmills (the later paintings invert the shape, now female, of rebirth and resurrection, pushing down instead of up, below the high horizon--Ahab's white whale, or the pass at Thermopylae).

Over the years he has found new reasons to paint, new memories, new shapes, new dreams, new landscapes, and his legend has grown as the mythology inside the work has grown. His oeuvre has always been intense. And intensely abstract in the way that we come to them. They just act abstract. Maybe skulls, lambs, words, horizons, but abstract. They are landscape but they are flat. They have light and depth but they seem to be much more about surface and texture. They are thick and heavy and dark but they shine. These are not qualities unique to the world of painting. These are not paradoxes unique to the world of painting. Spanish painting comes to mind. Goya, El Greco, Velasquez, even Picasso. They were not afraid of darkness and they used it to make light. So does Walker. If as Richard Tuttle once reminded me, black speaks about white, and despair speaks about hope, etc, and viceversa, then this is the ground we stand on with Walker. His sprawling scatological crusts of dark paint frame the light, his little crumbs of rainbow lead us down a crevasse.

Is there rage in these paintings? It causes tectonic shifts beneath their surface, and strikes out of nowhere like a mid-western tornado. Is there longing, and poetry, and a gentle hand? Surely. Like God or Shakespeare, Walker feels all things, and gives all things. Love is like the dew, it settles on the horse turd and the rose alike--Larry McMurtry once wrote something to that effect. In John Walker’s paintings the love also falls on both. We stand before his “frescoes,” his Giottos, we look up at them, like we watch Rembrandt’s side of beef, or Lear or Macbeth splayed before us on the stage:Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We are happy to witness this in the paintings. It is his plight, and in the end it is our plight. Life is a dubious experiment, as Jung said. Can we find peace with this? Should we find peace with this? Or should we be trying to talk to the manager, or whoever’s in charge? After all, what the hell is going on? Right? I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! Help us, Dante, help us Tom Cruise. What is this Divine Comedy? What is this existential joke/nightmare? John Walker serves up a slab of paint. It is as cathartic as Aeschylus and as searing as the deep blue sea. It rocks us. We walk away changed, and no matter whether he or anyone else knows it, we remember. Thank you, John Walker, and rock on!

ADDISON PARKS 2008

Addison Parks reacts to my new work on Artdeal

Happy to have a response to my new work on Artdeal vis a vis figuration at a moment when there has been an interest in work from the 90's on Twitter . Paul Pollaro saw some similarities:

"Strong painting. It's interesting to see the similarity to what you are doing now.You're new marks are objects and volumes like all the small things in the upper half of this one -and you honor the whole lateral surface. Fighting for elbow room. What's also interesting in this is the bottom which is pure AE as if you're building a whole new sensibility on top of it. Horrific painting in a lot of ways. It's hard not to see teeth, lipstick organs and mouth guards. Also something kitsch about it."

I am wondering if this was not a more primal moment of language which resembles what Richard Rorty said about the origins of language in grunts and howls. At the time I thought of the influence of grafitti  but more notions of phusis and biological growth.

Footprints 1997

Sargasso 1996

#67 2016

2016  #73

Lester Johnson's painting

Johnson 1960's

History has established itself as the final arbiter of the value of the life the artist lives and the art they produce. Having navigated the art scene for over forty years , I have observed that the current manifestation of History’s evolution and the fear of not being part of it has been the cudgel that has been wielded by the arbiters of taste over the head of any poor fool who dares enter the arena of art. 

I have images in my mind from “The Lord of the Rings” of Sauron, art critic, throwing Gandalf , artist into the abyss. This is not a world where sin will send you to eternal damnation; this is where the flavor of the month and whether you know what it is, can make you relevant or irrelevant. To get a sense of how one’s sense of self -worth is predicated on being aligned with “what’s happening”, just sit in on a graduate school critique or witness as I did your favorite class in color and observation get dropped from the curriculum by an administrative hack who wants to offer classes on gender theory.

The historical system that these arbiters use is that of the German philosopher Hegel.  It is not a linear system of dates and events; it is a logic which states that History marches forward dialectically, each era supplanted by the next. This transition is dynamic, i.e. the current structure is challenged by a new one and eventually supplants it but not before there is a synthesis of the two. It is premised on the role of conflict. Therefore, it sees man as inextricably forced to interact with or against societal norms. He gains his consciousness there and has no identity outside of it. Hegel formulated his system during the French Revolution which for him was consciousness realizing itself on an historical plane.

 The individual players were just acting out a huge cosmic plan. Individuality matters little except as it participates in or is transformed by the dialectic. History according to Hegel is a meat grinder, which shapes ordinary men into uniform hamburger patties that can be easily consumed by societal appetites.



 His most devastating insight into History’s trope gives me chills when I read it: ” What is rational is real, what is real is rational”. How does it feel to be caught in this vise: Nothing can be real for us unless it is reduced to thought so that rationality becomes the only reality. It pretty much paints the picture of the 20thc. 

Increasing rationalization of society by science interspersed with periodic paroxysm of horror at what has happened or delirious self- assertions of the self. The German Expressionist and the Abstract Expressionist shows side by side at MOMA represented those latter periods of individual revolt. 

Every revolution and its participants of the past two centuries have all justified their acts, violent or otherwise, by an appeal to a more rational order. The goal of Hegel’s world is pure consciousness where there is no distinction between self and world as self and object as both are subsumed in pure reason.

Johnson 1970's

In art, the evolution from representation to abstraction that was described by Clement Greenberg, a Hegelian, has the inevitability of the movement politically from monarchies to the modern state. Without this system of thinking there would be no mass culture, no zeitgeist or the repetition of generational selves that we are forced to identify with. It enframes how we dress, how we talk and how we paint.

The first inkling I got of the impact of this historical process in art oddly enough appeared to me in a late work of John Singer Sargent, exhibited at the MFA Boston some 16 years ago. It is a large mural of soldiers returning from WW 1 blinded by mustard gas, walking in a long line, the hand of the one behind on the soldier in front, the blind leading the blind. All 
are in uniform, somewhat tattered from battle, repeatable units without sight. 

"Gassed" John Singer Sargent

This is an uncanny image from the master of the exquisite moment, the painter of beautiful and egotistical upper class people of the Belle Époque surrounded by luxury and symbols of power; it is about blindness and uniformity. An artist, who had the ability and technique to represent anything placed in front of him, now shows an extraordinary courage in representing a new reality where the moment is deprived of nuance and subtlety, and the individual is reduced to a repetition of units where excessive observation is irrelevant. This is emblematic of the end of realism in a sense because the excessive sensory impact of bombs, shrapnel and mustard gas overwhelms any attempt by the senses to capture the world in a figurative fashion. 

Abstraction will be the lingua franca of 20th c art where all the rough edges of the real will be filed off ultimately dissolving the human presence all together. Greenberg inspired as he was by Hegel established a theory of the visual that made that movement from representation to abstraction inevitable. Much of the evolution had already taken place by the time he defined it, but it accelerated the process by creating a theory that gave artists who wanted to jump on the art train a goal of total reduction that could be easily predicted and imitated. It is Hegel’s art of pure rationality and it slowly dissolves the world of the bourgeoisie replacing it with uniform, blind monads that can be shaped into abstract patterns for war or commerce.  

In America of the ‘20s thru the ‘40s the realism of the Ashcan school and the Regionalists exist side by side with Abstraction but by the ‘50s Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism will have started a thirty year reign ending in the minimalism of the ‘70s and ‘80s. However, an ironic sort of realism appears in the form of Pop Art in the ‘60s and runs parallel to Abstraction. 

According to the literature about Lester Johnson, its ascension to power helped marginalize the figurative expressionism that he was identified with. The critical community had allowed him to ride on the coattails of Abstract Expressionism as a sort of variant that kept the action of the gesture but brought the figure back into the painting. 

Shifting the spot light away from Johnson to Pop art which, with its imitation of mechanical reproduction, put another nail in the coffin of any kind of representational art based on the individual either painting their real or psychological environment. It seemed there was no room for the deeply nuanced meditations of Lester on the relation of self and society.

 Pop art is in fact the perfect product of the rationalized society that Hegel said we were moving toward; millions of mass-produced items that could not exist without the industrial technology to produce them and a mass culture manipulated by the media to purchase them. It was the new representation of man and society. The artists who painted in that style were considered by the art historians to be incredibly clever and even cunning tricksters in figuring out that the individual with all his ambiguous relation to others and society was dead. The Self was now a strange meta-self that existed only in the media. Warhol in his shamanic way understood how the media would lift up the individual to realize this meta-self for his fifteen minutes of fame only to let him subsequently descend into obscurity. 

The media is our current equivalent of the pyramids, a collective project upon which millions slave to create and maintain. It is not for nothing that Warhol called his studio The Factory. The critics and artists who embraced this world view got to lord it over those artists with the epithet of Bourgeois, suffering  from a false consciousness. I recently saw a biopic of Camus where Sartre leveled that insult at Camus . That insult and the following were the mantras I heard repeated throughout my career: Death to painting, Death to the individual. The air got sucked out of Lester’s expressionist world very quickly.

Maybe the distance we now have from the art world of the ‘60s, will allow us to reappraise the importance of Johnson’s work . A student today would have to look hard to locate it in the literature which shines its light on those movements surrounding it but bypasses his figurative endeavor. Maybe the inevitability of art history can be reversed or redirected. The current show at the Acme Gallery in Boston provides a broad swathe of his work that has helped this artist, who studied with him at Yale, rethink his importance. 

His painting’s interface with the Abstract Expressionism out of which it grew and with Pop art, which supplanted it in the critical community, is complicated. First of all, he would be considered a second-generation abstract expressionist and secondly a figurative expressionist, so twice removed from the source. 

Both de Kooning and Pollock ended their careers painting centrifugal works that are Whitman-like in their expansive notion of the self. They resemble the sensibility of Romantic American landscape painters such as Bierstadt or Frederick Church and become quintessentially American. Lester is no romantic. He sees the human condition as fraught with ambiguity grounded in the active human presence and by extension the human community. It is not mankind or humanity in the abstract that he paints, but “Da-sein”, the Heideggerian term which puts man beyond his self-consciousness into the human community without giving primacy to either one or the other. 

Johnson’s early heads from the early to mid sixties ‘60s are emphatic in their message that we are here in this world not somewhere else. The implied effort of his stroke states that Lester Johnson is in a shared space with the head of the person he is representing. There is always a sense of decision in the splash of the paint on canvas. Man cannot avoid deciding for or against something.  His frequent use of the Classical Greek head seems to say that this idea of man has always been with us. It is trans-historical, anti-Hegelian. His work has that knotty difficult quality of a Beckett play, where despite all the gestures and acts nothing is resolved; Human existence is reduced to its essence in “Waiting for Godot”, where act upon act doesn’t seem to resolve their angst. In the end they are there, just there. 

Lester Johnson came of age in a generation that did not buy into ecstatic notions of pop culture. He did not lose himself in the social mood, like my generation does. He was not part of the generation that wanted to be “groovy” or “go with the flow” a generation that imprinted on mass media. They are the artists of the death of the individual, the exaltation of the corporate man. In that sense Pop also becomes the next quintessentially American art form. It is just a tip of the hat to those images crafted as artifacts created for mass culture. 

The complexity of the self is gone as artists like Warhol glory in the vacuum that has been created. Johnson’s work is a much more nuanced and sophisticated revelation of the individual vs. the group. With his series of paintings of people joined arm in arm from the late sixties he acknowledges that people join groups; they lock hands like the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall to act together as a crowd. Some recent writing on Heidegger makes the case that he did not use the term ”They” in a pejorative way. It was an inevitable aspect of da-sein, part of the human condition. 

Lester Johnson could be considered asking the same questions as a phenomenologist trying to describe the shape of what it means to be human. However, being part of the group is not an unquestioned given as it was for the pop artist. The line up of generic men in Johnson’s work is often scary. They are reminiscent of the living dead that pour out of the Underground in T.S Eliot’s London. They are unsmiling and unaware of the condition that defines their identity with the group, carried along by some mass hysteria. 

In his work of the Seventies and Eighties, the generation where the media co-opts every attempt of the individual to break the mold, the “They” in his work has changed its story. The light is brighter and sunnier. His characters are dressed each in different patterns of the period and although they are locked arm in arm like the bowler wearing men of the ‘50s they gaze out dreamily in different directions. Despite those slight gestures toward individuality they are still side by side. They are always plural not singular.

Lester Johnson places himself in the midst of the world Janus-like  looking at  the self and the group at once and asking so many questions: Who am I who is forced to decide and act? And who are “they” who act as a whole? Is there such a thing as “We”? And what is this hand that creates this image in a kind of existential act? Where do I end and the other start?

In one painting from the late sixties, he paints himself with a focus on his hand holding a brush in front of a painting of his men in the street asks the question” Who is this person, what is this hand who has created these characters.” Other self-portraits show a blunted hand as though the brush is tied to it reminiscent of the photograph of Renoir who had to tie a brush to his arthritic hand toward the end of his life in order to paint. The hand translates the world within to the canvas. Is he saying it is just an extension of the will and an instrument that is forced to blindly act, or is it too limited and clumsy to convey everything within? If you are capable of any subtlety in your thinking, these paintings will initiate it. They warrant multiple viewings and their graphic simplicity belies their complexity.

One drawing in the show at Acme that I took great pleasure in looking at was an ink brush drawing of a view through a window of the ocean in Provincetown from the fifties. The space depicted starting from a table and chairs in front of him, to the window frame, then the porch and finally the boats on the water are all rendered by the same black unmodulated stroke. The space is compressed and all the things are simply depicted.  My first thought on looking at it, was that this guy is visually astute. He can draw.

 I remember that he was the only faculty member at Yale to talk with me one on one about my thesis show. He said he admired the kind of space I had created in my still life’s, which were in fact very flattened out and very influenced by Matisse .He had understood the importance of space even within flatness and how without space Matisse would only have been a mere designer. I thought as well of how drawing is not offered in grad school at Yale anymore, at least according to a conversation Bernie Chaet had with the current Dean Robert Storr while Chaet was doing his portrait (interestingly enough a portrait with blue smudges instead of eyes). How do you abstract from the real in front of you; is it only an old fashioned exercise in epistemology? Is there any nature left to learn from as we spend most of our lives in front of the computer screen. Lester created so much light in that drawing by activating the page with his use of black. Such old fashioned concepts: space and light.

How do we work our way back to Johnson’s work and let it tell its story? Current art criticism and the art of the academy because it is under the thrall of Duchamp with the primacy of ideas over the optical, is highly critical of painting that carries a scent of representation, as though someone like Johnson’s work does not think; The art criticism of the past leaves him towered over by their mythological treatment of the Abstract Expressionists and Pop Art. 

I hope that what little I have written here lets us see that Lester Johnson’s work is a profound meditation on our being in the world, with all the ambiguities between self and society. A psychologist and a sociologist can use these terms to describe the structure of both but they can’t tell you how it feels to be a self among others and witness to the masses of people in the modern city who define themselves as a single self. What do all those definitions look like? The hand knows more than the conscious mind. Lester trusted it to reveal secrets about our world and self that the mind could only over-simplify. 

He knew that to paint/see with a brush at the end of your hand as an extension of the body and the mind allowed him to discover unconscious insights not explicit in our day-to-day existence. This discovery was an event in paint . To the contemporary artist who accepts that they are doomed or destined (sometimes I don’t know which verb applies) to express themselves in a language of painting that in kindergarten was the universal language by which every child described their world and became an expressive medium in the 20thc in the hands of Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and their American students, Gorky, deKooning and Pollock, they should find much to give them comfort and inspiration in viewing and studying Lester’s work.

Painting treads a path of cognition unique to the visual artist. It must break free of the burden of history and the predications of the priestly class of intellectuals who establish a priori what can or cannot be done in the world of art. That class has been enormously successful; there is currently one show in the  galleries world-wide, whether in Paris, Rome New York or Shanghai: Photo originated image on the wall, a found object on the floor and a title about the oppression of some group excluded from the Hegelian dialectic. An artist must proclaim like Lester: ”Here I stand.This is my experience and this is how it feels to be alive. ”


HANDROSE


You almost became 
“They”
Your rockettes
Arm in  Arm.

Or Eliot’s living dead
That flowed over London Bridge.

The Brooklyn
That Miller left for 
Paris and from a private paradise
Shaped the flower of  the 
70’s (1)

You stuck it out.
You knew that it all added up  to 
Nothing, anyway.
Sacrificed the
caress of private moments to 
monitor  the storm troopers
Marching to and from work.

One day in front of your stolid men
last weeks stump
Bloomed. Your tortured hand


(1)Miller’s  grim images of Brooklyn in  “The Tropic of Cancer” make me think of Johnson’s men. Miller escaped New York and created a private love nest with Anais Nin in Paris, out of which grew private notions of self-realization that were fodder for the delirious sex drugs and rock and roll culture in the California of the sixties and seventies. Mamet in a recent essay on American theatre sees Eliot and Pound as escapists and I am sure he would throw Miller into this category. Lester’s world is one of men who are compelled to act not knowing what the consequences are. Somewhat like a Mamet play, Johnson’s painting has a stolid determination about it.

My Visit with Edwin Dickinson 1970

    I first saw Dickinson's work in the Biennale in Venice in 1968 where he  represented the USA along with Red Grooms. As an aspiring young figurative painter at the height of Abstraction's popularity, I was anxious to find someone whom I could look up to as a mentor. In Dickinson I found that person. I was overwhelmed by the sensitivity of his work and, in particular, the magic of his small studies and drawings which captured a sense of the  moment that I saw nowhere else in the New Realism of the late 60's and 70's. 

   The romantic identification of self with light, space and objects seemed closer to the artists of the 19th than the 20th century. I was so taken by the work I wrote him a fan letter. I did not get a reply until the Summer of 1970 when a letter from him was forwarded to me at the Yale Summer School of Norfolk, where I was a student, asking me to come visit him in Wellfleet. I remember Bernie Chaet was there when I opened the letter and I recall that he was impressed that I was in communication with such an artistic luminary as Edwin Dickinson. 

    When I came home from Norfolk I gave him a call to set up a time to visit. I remember that he was curmudgeonly and berated me for not having a calendar in front of me when we looked forward to  setting up a date for the visit. He told me that he deserved more respect than I was showing him. I was to learn later that he had recently suffered a stroke and that the consequent brain damage had altered his personality.

    His wife greeted me at the door of his home, an antique Cape in Wellfleet, at the end of a long driveway, where it overlooked the marshes. Mrs. Dickinson, who I recall was a lot taller and younger
 than Edwin, was clearly orchestrating the visit. After a few formalities, he took me back to his studio where he regaled me with stories of his life at sea. He had clearly had led an adventurous life beyond the studio, which had some effect on the way I viewed my own career and in particular my decision to move to Europe  after grad school. I had brought down some recent works for him to critique but he refused to look at them saying he had given out too much free advice in his day. That uncharitable response I again attribute to his stroke, although at the time, I was very much hoping for his stamp of approval.

   When I visited him he was clearly past his prime and the exchange was not as I imagined it would transpire. However, to this day, his work can still cast its spell on me and I feel fortunate to have spent that afternoon with him. If you are to place him in the pantheon of American artists it is best not to see him as a modernist at all but a preserver of 19th
century  transcendentalism. A continuation of the tradition of Inness and Ryder.

    The identification of self and nature is antithetical to our contemporary zeitgeist and I don't expect that to change any time soon. His sense of the moment in painting was sharper and more of an event than for Inness and, in that sense, more akin to action painting  and therefore more contemporary. It just does not have that hard separation of self and world that is the hallmark of everything modern.