Breaking it Down

Peter Plagens and Jerry Saltz (Photo: Art Forum)

I’m not that worried about people in general liking my painting (de gustibus, what makes horse races, etc.) because I’m more or less used to their not, generally speaking. My abstract paintings are, I think, too craggy or disjointed or garish (although I have gone through a few piss-elegant phases) to be generally likeable. Funny things are that if there’s any commonality to my work from the beginning to now, it’s that I simply want to paint paintings that are good-looking (albeit on my terms), and you’d think that somebody who’s also been an art critic all this time would have a better idea of what might constitute “good-looking” to people other than himself.

Not that I want to settle, mind you, for my painting being merely good looking. Almost inevitably, it’s supposed to express something…

Painting and art history, painting vs. video and installation art, “painting—see ‘death of,’” and all that stuff. I started out as a painter and, since I possess genetically half of a plodding Teutonic temperament, I’ve stayed one. Connections to perhaps the deepest, richest mode of Western art since the Fall of Rome have sustained satisfaction, yes, but sheer force of habit has played a large part, too. Not to mention circumstance: if I’d been born in 1841 instead of 1941, I’d probably have been a printer’s apprentice; 1981 instead of ’41 and I’d likely be doing digitally interactive whatever. Nevertheless, I really do think that there’s something there in painting, especially abstract painting, that one just doesn’t get elsewhere.

–From Peter Plagens’ artist statement

Peter Plagens‘ artist statement (which you can read in its entirety here) is more word heavy than most—which one would expect from a prolific writer who is also an artist like Plagens—but I particularly responded to this last paragraph. His reasoning fits me as well: a genetic proclivity to tenacity; the circumstances of being born, in America, in the second half of the 20th century; and the undeniable sense that something extraordinary can take place when encountering nonobjective painting that doesn’t happen, for me, in any other medium.

Guston as Hafiz

From the tomb of Hafiz at Shiraz, Iran

Gurus and teachers. Having one is a given in most spiritual paths, common in many cultures and certain professions. But because I was never a good candidate for the disciple path (according to my mother, my resistance to authority was well developed at three years old), I never did the artist/mentor thing. It is probably the core reason why I have never wanted to teach and have kept my distance from any established spiritual tradition. What has worked so well for many just isn’t a fit for me.

But my library is full of advice, wisdom and insights from extraordinary minds. A book is the perfect delivery mechanism for those of us with power over issues: It neutralizes what would set us off in the flesh, and makes it easy for us to pick and choose at our own pace, on our own terms.

There are many artists in the Boston area who studied with Philip Guston while he was at Boston University. I have had extensive conversations about Guston the Teacher with Bruce Herman, chair of the Art Department at Gordon College, and more recently with David Goldman who teaches at North Shore Community College. When I hear their stories I am grateful that my exposure to Guston has been limited to his work and his writing. I am very sure I would not have fared well interacting with him directly. He was difficult. He was dogmatic. But he was also a gifted artist.

The book of his collected writings, lectures and conversations edited by Clark Coolidge is full of his koan-like art wisdom. I keep it close at hand and use it daily. This is my own version of the Persian tradition of consulting the Oracle of Shiraz, Hafiz, a popular method of divination that consists of thinking of a question and then randomly opening up Hafiz’ book of poetry. The answer is believed to be there on the page.

I am not looking for divination so much as I am in search of an operating frame for my day in the studio. The Guston book delivers again and again.

Here’s a Gustonism from the catalog for a 1958 show at the Whitney called Nature in Abstraction:

I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.

I think the only pressing question in painting is: When are you through? For my own part it is when I know I’ve “come out the other side.” This occasional and sudden awareness is the truest image for me. The clocklike path of this recognition suppresses a sense of victory: it is an ironic encounter and more of a mirror than a picture.

Philip Guston the teacher

Two Chords Are Enough

The cast of Woody Sez (Photo: Wendy Mutz)

One of the things I love about India is that the stories most sacred to the culture are preserved everywhere. From street shrines to oversized temple statues, references to the ancient Sanskrit epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are ubiquitous. After a while even interlopers like me get good at finding Rama, the Monkey King Hanuman and the Demon Ravana.

Those songlines run deep in subcontinental consciousness, but they also remind me that we have songlines of our own even if they are not quite as ancient. One of the stories most Americans know is about the Great Depression and the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Drought and farming practices in the 1930s led to the loss of millions of acres of farmland, forcing hundreds of thousands of “Okies” to become homeless migrants in search of work at a time when jobs were scarce.

Woody Guthrie lived through the indignities of that era, writing music that came to stand for the rights of the disenfranchised. He believed in “singing for the plain folks and getting tough with the rich folks.” Guthrie lived what he wrote, and his music was for those who were living the “left out” life too. Without Guthrie we have no Pete Seeger, no music of protest, no Bob Dylan. He’s our lynchpin.

Woody Sez, currently at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge before heading next to Germany (cool!) and Chicago, is an unforgettable retelling of that American epic story through the life of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. A quartet of multi-talented performers—David Lutken, Darcie Deaville, Helen Jean Russell and Andy Teirstein—will grab you from the get go and never let you go. The music is nonstop, and every member of this high energy, well-rehearsed quartet can sing and play muliple instruments. The staging is simple and the set unadorned, just as it should be. And just as Woody would have wanted it.

The relevance of this story for today’s times is powerful. To state the obvious—that we live in a culture that rewards greed, selfishness and personal aggrandizement at any cost—often ends up sounding like a broken record that no longer has any bite. But watching this performance put our American songline of injustice and income inequality into a context that is much deeper and more profound than I had expected.

I absolutely loved seeing Woody Sez, and I would recommend it to everyone.

A few examples of Woody Sez:

***
Was a great high wall there that tried to stop me, A sign was painted said: “Private Property”, But on the back side, it didn’t say nothing. That side was made for you and me.

***
Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.

***
I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that.

***
It’s round the world I’ve traveled; it’s round the world I’ve roamed; but I’ve yet to see an outlaw drive a family from its home.

***
If you play more than two chords, you’re showing off.

Guthrie in 1944 (Photo: Associated Press)

Color Dogmatism

Josef Albers, the Color Czar (for some folks anyway)

“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.”
–Josef Albers

“If you don’t do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.”
–Josef Albers

How humans perceive color is not dissimilar to how humans raise a child: Even though we have been at it for thousands of years, we still don’t agree on how to do it.

Josef Albers is the artist most often associated with color theory as well as color dogmatism. The battle between the Albers method and other color systems continues in art pedagogy, a discussion I typically watch from the sidelines since I am a dogged nonreligionist on this topic. For me it has and always will be an element of art that is subjective, furtive and unexpected.

But even though I do not subscribe to any one system of thought on color, I love to read about it. I probably have over 20 books in my library on the topic. And recently I found a website that approaches color theory in a refreshingly non-doctrinaire but well informed manner. Color System is based on the research of two professors, Narciso Silvestrini and Ernst Peter Fischer, and brings together illustrated overviews of 59 different color order systems from both art and science. The list starts with theorists from antiquity (Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato) cuts through to Goethe and current approaches. The site also includes a few overviews of the significance of color in a number of cultural systems—astrological, Islamic, Liturgical, Symbolism and Heraldry among others. For anyone interested in color, this is fascinating stuff.

Extra bonus: If you enjoy playing with color and color perception, here’s a great site for you: Color is Relative

Goethe’s color wheel

Bruce Conner: Authentic Tomfoolery

Bruce Conner

The archetype of The Fool has been written about at length. The permutations are many, but the most common variance for most of us is from Shakespeare’s plays. Fools are never what they seem. And they are certainly not “fools.”

Art history has its fools as well, even (and especially) in recent years. One of my favorites who played with that archetype is Bruce Conner, another artist from my list of Noncanonicals (more about that here.)

Conner was a West Coast artist—my proclivities lean that way as many of you know—and someone I remember from my earlier years growing up in California. A new and excellent biography by Kevin Hatch, Looking for Bruce Conner, offers an evenhanded and highly readable account of Connor’s career.

Conner’s art is so wide ranging, crossing over into every medium and point of view. Categorizing him has been nearly impossible. Some of his works are so powerful for me personally that I do plan to write a few future blog posts more specifically about his oeuvre.

Hatch’s account includes several of Conner’s hilariously dissembling antics. Besides his amazing visual art making, Conner was way clever, persnickity and very smart. It was probably that combination of qualities that contributed to his reputation for being both irascible and endearing. But the adventures of his life make for great stories.

Here is a sampling: Conner decides to run for office in San Francisco back in 1967 as a prank. A friend and poet James Broughton (and one time husband to Pauline Kael) wrote a poem for the occasion called, “Tomfool for President: A Campaign Song for Bruce Conner.”

Tomfool, come tickle us
with authentic tomfoolery
Our motes have got too many beams in their eyes.
Turn topsy these turtles
on their lopsided noodles.
Clean sweep the whole country with indecent surprise!

From Hatch’s book:

Tom Fool, of course, was a mythical figure, and Conner’s persona gained its own mythic proportions over the years…the fool’s two traditional guises, court jester and festival clown, have a common ancestor in the individual under possession, “inspired with a higher wisdom.”

The idea of ancient, sacred wisdom is much to the point. There is a profoundly atavistic quality in Conner’s work that extends fro his assemblages and collages to his prints and drawings…This atavistic tendency partakes of the mysterious: the work consistently points inward, toward an unreachable center, even as it opens out toward the public sphere (achieving the latter most often via the outmoded goods of postwar American’s recent but forgotten past.) Broughton’s phrase “indecent surprise” aptly captures the spirit of the work. Profane and sacred, humorous and tragic, private and universal—all these antinomies are pushed to the breaking point, with results that often astonish.

Ah the wisdom of the fool, the wisdom of knowing where to poke. More on Conner will be forthcoming.

Rapt with Satisfied Attention

“Pale Pair (for Malevich)”, hand dyed wool on linen, by Altoon Sultan (Photo: Altoon Sultan)

In recent years I’ve begun to think of all my various endeavors — painting, textiles, photography, blogging — as part of a whole artistic life, broader and more ordinary than my New York art-world life. I want to make art out of the overlooked, whether in photographs, in paintings of farm machines or in using a common craft technique. I am interested in “being rapt with satisfied attention,” as William James wrote, and I agree with the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami when he said, “Even daily life should ultimately reach an essence that is akin to poetry.”

What a great way to finish an interview, which is exactly what Rob Colvin did in his conversation with artist Altoon Sultan on Hyperallergic.

For those of you who do not know Altoon, she is a force of nature online. From her studio and home in Vermont she frequently shares images of her recent work on her blog, Studio and Garden, and her website, Altoon Sultan.

Altoon is a highly productive artist, and I have come to look forward to the consistent stream of images that shows up on my screen. Even in their digitized presence they speak with visual clarity, primal elementality, a centered calm. They make me want to engage, to pull in closer, to touch with the eye and the hand. Often intimate in a smaller format, they feel like the embodiment of enchantment—objects that have a power far greater than it might appear. Their apparent simplicity is not what it seems. You need to stay tuned, to keep looking.

A brief overview about Altoon from Colvin’s piece:

Over the course of her 35-year career, Sultan has gone completely end-to-end across the landscape-abstraction continuum. Widely known for her finely detailed panoramas of farms shown at Marlborough Gallery for two decades, then at Tibor de Nagy, she has, in more recent years, taken to small-scale abstractions in the form of egg tempera paintings and hooked wool textiles.

In March, Sultan’s textiles made their New York debut at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects’ optically charged booth at Scope. This coming out, as it were, along with the significant interest being given to abstraction right now, made it seem like a good time to ask Sultan a few questions about what’s been happening in her studio.

Well deserved. Congrats to you Altoon.

“2011 #2,” hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen (Photo: Altoon Sultan)

Making, Matter and Unity

“Surfaces seduce and entities evolve: It is exquisite getting lost in the mysterious pageant of the making.” (Close up of a recent piece)

I spend a lot of time alone. But being isolated for most of the day doesn’t mean the mind stops chattering. It chatters constantly, but the dialogue is either internal (between entities whose identities are still undetermined IMHO) or with that object in front of me, the WIP (work in process.)

Is there such a thing as a dialogue carried on with a painting? This is hard to describe to someone whose thinking is precise and linear. But for many of us, the objects we make are conversational and they do engage in a back and forth of ideas, tensions, directionals, outcomes. No, they are not sentient beings. But maybe they are something else. Maybe they are a something that has its own dynamic arc of aliveness. Like I said, this is hard to describe.

Something that showed up in a conversation between painter Philip Guston and art critic David Sylvester touches into this if just obliquely. Here is Guston talking about the picture plane:

We were talking yesterday at the studio about the picture plane, and to me there’s some mysterious element about the plane. I can’t rationalize it, I can’t talk about it, but I know there’s an existence on this imaginary plane which holds almost all the fascination of painting for me. As a matter of fact, I think the true image only comes out when it exists on this imaginary plane. but in schools you hear everyone talk about the picture plane as a first principle. And in the beginning design class, it’s still labored to death. Yet I think it’s one of the most mysterious and complex things to understand. I’m convinced that it’s almost a key, and yet I can’t talk about it; nor do I think it can be talked about. There’s something very frustrating, necessary, and puzzling about this metaphysical plane that painting exists on. And I think that, when it’s either eliminated or not maintained intensely, I get lost in it. This plane exists in the other arts, anyway. Think of the poetic plane and the theater plane. And it has to do with matter. it has to do with the very matter that the thing is done in.

And later in the conversation, Guston shares a few more painterly insights:

It’s terrible to rationalize about painting because you know that, while you’re creating it, you can have all sorts of things in your mind consciously that you want to do and that really won’t be done. You won’t be finished until the most unexpected and surprising things happen. I find I can’t compose a picture anymore. I suppose I’ve been thinking about painting structures for many years, but I find that I know less and less about composing and yet, when the thing comes off in this old and new way at the same time, weeks later, I get it, and it arrives at a unity that I never could have predicted and foreseen or planned.

Ah, the love of uncertainty. The thrill when “the most unexpected and surprising things happen.” Surfaces seduce and entities evolve: It is exquisite getting lost in the mysterious pageant of the making.

Willing Magic

Agnes Martin at Dia:Beacon

The etymology of the term “jaded” surprised me. It has been traced back to a 14th century Middle English word for a worn-out horse, one that can no longer pull a cart or work the fields. It is about being wearied, exhausted, spent, bored, out of juice.

While the roots of the term are utilitarian and agricultural, it has now morphed into a condition that is all too human. It is used to describe someone dissipated through sybaritic overindulgence as well as a person who has worked with the public too long and just has no patience left for collective human idiocy. Sheer repetition of the mundane, like the barrage of noninformation that is Fox News and talk radio, can also result in a dulling and deadening of our response.

But it is overexposure of a loftier kind that troubles me most. In many ways it is the dark side of devotion: Our passions drive us to excess, but answering that appetitive call for more, more! can also come at a price.

James Elkins offers a cautionary warning in his book, Pictures and Tears. As part of his research on emotional responses to art, Elkins polled his art history and critic colleagues to find out if they had ever cried in front of a painting. He was amazed by the responses. Some said they remembering tearing up in front of a work of art when they were younger, but that had not happened since they became trained experts. Some of Elkins’ colleagues said they thought it would be viewed as extremely unprofessional for them to exhibit that degree of emotionalism toward a work of art.

Of course saving face (even though we could have a whole other discussion about what that means) is not the only reason a distancing takes place over time. Can you look at and contemplate art every day for a lifetime and still keep the fresh openmindedness that drove you to art and art making in the first place?

I fight this flagging in myself. I have to watch my thoughts with vigilance when I find myself glazing over. It can be a slow drift into disconnection, but the symptoms are obvious: Walking too fast past paintings I have seen hundreds of times; listening to the conversations in my head rather than letting my body feel and lead; feeling uninspired and well, jaded.

And sometimes you need to relearn enchantment from those who are new to an experience and fully present to the joy that comes from discovering art, music, writing for the first time. Yesterday was a good example. I brought two friends to Dia:Beacon, their first visit to a place I have been to many, many times. Yes I am still moved by Robert Irwin‘s vision for that former Nabisco box printing plant, and many of the artists on exhibit continue to speak to me. But watching my two companions discover room after room of extraordinary work—from Robert Ryman‘s rarefied explorations of white to John Chamberlain‘s phalanx of twisted metal stanchions to Agnes Martin‘s exquisite invitations into a silent stillness to Sol LeWitt‘s enchanted graphite tooling of walls—made me stop and consider how I have allowed distance and overexposure to detach me from the joy that is there, ambient and freely available. When I read what my partner Dave wrote about his visit, “Being in 3 rooms full of Agnes Martins definitely leads one to believe in a female deity,” I was reminded that receptivity does have an aspect of conscious will. Magic is happening whether we are tuning in or not. I don’t want to miss any of it.

The exquisite human handedness of a stuttering graphite line: Looking closely at an Agnes Martin painting

Sunging

Image of a house on a mountain top, Sung Dynasty

Guston could easily play with the notion that the working artist aspired to be a demigod and, as such, would have to experience a peculiar kind of hubris—Guston’s own idiosyncratic hubris. This was one of his most distinctive leitmotifs, expressed in another way when he spoke of “a third hand” doing the work. That metaphorical hand becomes shorthand for describing an experience every true painter knows—that of transcending himself and his tools, as if following some ancient imperative. Sometimes Guston couched these thoughts in terms of the Sung painters, whom he deeply admired. He thought they did “something thousands and thousands of times…until someone else does it, not you, and the rhythm moves through you.”

This passage is from Dore Ashton’s introduction to Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge. The mystical sense of this idea—not a quality I typically associate with Guston‘s approach—can also be juxtaposed to one of Guston’s favorite quotes that was inscribed below a self portrait by Giorgio de Chirico: “What shall I love if not the enimga?” Or also alongside another favorite from Franz Kafka:

The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.

Third hand interventions, loving the enigma, talking a path that causes stumbling rather than walking—they all speak to what passes through the mind during a typical week. And all of it is in an effort to reach that moment when you can feel yourself “sunging”—the exquisite experience of having a rhythm that is moving through you.

Enduring the Mystery

A close up view of Candara, from a painting series inspired by space and planetary bodies

1.
Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people
When what holds them together isn’t exactly love, and I think
That sounds right—how strong the pull can be, as if something
That knows better won’t let you drift apart so easily, and how
Small and heavy you feel, stuck there spinning in place.

Anita feels it now as a tug toward the phone, though she knows
The ear at the other end isn’t there anymore. She’ll beat her head
Against the rungs of her room till it splits, and the static that seeps out
Will lull her to sleep, where she’ll dream of him walking just ahead
Beside a woman whose mouth spills O after O of operatic laughter.

But Tina isn’t talking about men and women, what starts in our bodies
And then pushes out toward anywhere once the joy of it disappears.
She means families. How two sisters, say, can stop knowing one another,
Stop hearing the same language, scalding themselves on something
Every time they try to touch. What lives beside us passing for air?

–Excerpt from the poem, Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

2011 will be remembered as a year with no novel deemed worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. But thankfully the poetry recipient, Tracy K. Smith, has the gravitas to hold her place singlehandedly. Her award winning collection, Life on Mars, is a rich inquiry, complex and yet accessible. She has said the poems were inspired by her father who worked as an engineer on the Hubble project, and a contemplation of space and our place in that immense order of things runs throughout the poems. In the words of one reviewer in the New York Times, “Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we’re alone in the universe; it’s to accept—or at least endure—the universe’s mystery.”