Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Lee Friedlander: Off the Road and Out of the Car

(this review was written contemporaneous with the "Recent Western Landscape" exhibit September 2010)  

Lee Friedlander’s current exhibition, entitled Recent Western Landscape, now on view at Mary Boone’s Midtown location supplements the concurrent America By Car show at the Whitney. Both catalogue trips across the American West made in recent years. There, the car looms as the artist’s surrogate, here, the same locations layout unmediated by the vehicle’s bounding frame.

Friedlander bushwhacks, in snow and sun, through thickets of grass, limbs, and tree trunks. Shot in Glen Canyon, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert these 65 photographs document the terrain “beyond the car,” absent signs of human intervention. Nature seems to appear, a l’etat brut, unadorned by the photographer’s long shadow. Yet, like the drum beat consistency of their uniform square format, Friedlander’s enigmatic authorial presence grows more conspicuous with each work.

These photographs are made in an artisanal tradition of picture making which harkens to a bygone Fifth Avenue. The majestic thoroughfare was once site to Alfred Steiglitz's 291 Gallery. Apt to be mistaken as formalist abstractions these photographs are not mere exercises in compositional rigor, technically facility, or photographic veracity. They illustrate and transcend the sheer force of brute visual fact.

The 2 ¼ inch negative of his Hasselblad camera captures light with all the crystalline clarity of an engraving. It allows for an opulence of delicate tonal contrasts, textures, and patterns all teased from nature, and all subtly stuffed in a 15” x 15” square. Confined to the square,  no work lacks a delightful dynamic equilibrium of light and form.

Painters beware, the best images demonstrate an immaculate sensitivity to the picture plane and bounding rectangle comparable to a Manet or Cézanne. In contrast to Friedlander’s montage-like signature, foreground obstructions unify these images. Rococo filigrees of foliage sprout out engulfing their surfaces. Dendrites of brushwood synthesize linear and painterly and their abstract beauty belies any documentary assumption.

A restraining conceit, the nettled skeins of foreground flora establish the spatial order continually recalling our eye from fictive depth to the literal surface of the medium. They insist that we are looking at someone’s picture, not a mirror up to nature.

Amidst the layers of space a tenuous balance between hierarchy and all-overness is struck.  A dubious stability invigorates their austere homogenous format as each approaches the precipice of Pollock’s gestural chaos. They are so many explorations, so many rehearsals of form. Like a jazz musician Friedlander pursues similar motifs with improvisational variation, always teetering on the verge...

Their jewel-like painterliness easily recalls a lyrical Corot or late Titian. Are these the works of a late master inclined to isolation from the “social landscape” he was once so fond?

Never afraid of such realities his perspective on them has always evaded categories so often harped on in recent photography. His elusive interpretation of the landscape makes them all the more challenging to decode on the linguistic level. Alone in nature Friedlander increasingly plays a retiring Jean-Jacques Rousseau studying his plants on the l’îsle de Saint-Pierre.

The tradition of American landscape is their  point of departure. This mythic American road trip brings us face to face with a frontier both familiar and foreign. He has long afforded intimate if unsentimental access to our landscape. Rarely traveling to distant lands he makes exotic that which is burdened by our acquaintance. Most captivating is this journey’s elusive end. Absent are the manifest signifiers alluding to the destiny of popular art and culture over the last fifty years.  

Like Bierstadt or Adams these images might parade some grand American vista. Yet Friedlander occludes potential icons with a thicket of limbs. Views are repeatedly submerged under brambles, like paintings behind Duchamp’s Sixteen Miles of String. The build up of overlapping spatial planes become successive layers of geological sediment. The deep vistas of these “combines” continually collapse into foregrounds elements, demoting them to latent symbols. By thwarting the view such obstructions become the view.

Foreground layers are as much an esoteric game of form as the taciturn surrogate of the artist’s looming presence. Friedlander, known for surreptitiously exposing himself in shadowy silhouettes and fugitive storefront reflections, seems to have rematerialized in even more elliptical guise. The chaotic web of nature floating on their surface establishes a metaphor for the unique lens of consciousness through which this photographer filters his visual world.


Richard Serra & the Plane of Painting

Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905





"First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to he painted is seen." 
- from Alberti's On Painting










"Aware that whenever I state this I incur a heavy silence, I point out once more that what De Pictura 1.19 maintains is that ifyou draw a rectangle then you may treat it-the drawn rectangle that is, not the entire hypothetical surface-as an open window. Of itself, the given conventionally flat format of painting, whether panel in the fifteenth century or stretched canvas now, neither entails nor implies Alberti's "window." The flat surface with edges precedes what Alberti calls a window, which is a construct, willfully imposed. 'The "window" idea, then, is a trope,:3 and a signal of the essentally fictive poetics of painting."
Untitled, 1972 (charcoal on paper)


"There was no way to make a tree. And there wasn't any Idea of "tree," not in your imagination, not in your fictive imagination, not it the reality of mark making. Because everyone seems to make up their own tool, and everyone has their own procedure.And it was totally revealing because basically, what Schuler was telling these people who were trying to get the elbow attached to the finger correctly was that there is no [one] way to draw an arm, there's no [one] way to draw a hand, there's only drawing (gerand, process) and there is only the invention of drawing."

"There is no [right] way to make a drawing, there is only drawing."
"There is only drawing and there is only the invention of drawing."

"Its up to you to make your own drawing."

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51 (7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4")


The external appearance of nature as perceived by the eye does not and should not limit the parameters and possiblities of drawing. Drawing as an inventions limited only to the imagination and technical faculties of the artist.


Untitled, 1973 Paintstick and charcoal on paper; 50 x 38 in.
Vir Heroicus Sublimis in situ















Serra's reinvention of the pictorial plane surface of painting and drawing into a bodily and phenomenological space bounded on by the sensation of light on the retina but extended into the three-dimensional realm of the body and all its sensativity responsiveness to the physical space it occupies.
Drawing into architecture
Blank, 1978
(Paintstick on Belgian linen; 2 parts, each 10 ft. 1/4 in. x 10 ft. 1/4 in.)

Friday, May 6, 2011

"It's El Guitare!"

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1913





         "What is it? Does it rest on a pedestal? Does it hang on a wall? What is it, painting or sculpture?" 

                  "It's nothing, its el guitare!" And there you are! The watertight compartments are demolished. We are delivered from painting and sculpture, which already have been liberated form the idiotic tyranny of genres. It is neither this nor that. It is nothing. It's el guitare."








The current exhibition Picasso’s Guitar: 1912-1914 at the Museum of Modern Art presents a historically rich and focused group of works on and of paper. Included are drawing, papier collé, collage, and three dimensional paper constructions. The array of media demonstrate a related set of formal concerns explored over a brief but intense period.
The paperboard guitar  with contemporaneous Cubist papier collés installed in Picasso's boulevard Raspail Paris, December 9, 1912
Highlighted is Braque and Picasso’s development of collage and papier collé. This discovery marked a decisive shift in their collective understanding of pictorial and sculptural space. The new language developed would establish the distinction between so-called "Analytic" and "Synthetic" Cubism.

The term "collage" derives from the French verb, coller, the infinitive meaning “to paste.” A collage then, is literally a “pasted thing!" This new construction technique and its mass-produced media led to one of the most significant revisions of the relation between form and space in the history of sculpture. 
Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912, charcoal on paper

Toward the end of 1912 Braque and Picasso embarked on a series of two and three dimensional works in which the various forms of a guitar emerged as the hub of their investigations. Braque was apparently the first to come upon the pasted paper techinique. This period of impromtu discovery produced a most unprecedented work, a cardboard guitar, assembled in the manner of papier collé, but projecting of the wall into the third dimension in the manner of sculptural relief.  
 

This work, El Guitar, makes sculptural form paper thin. The bulky volume of traditional sculpture is denied. Here Picasso self consciously juxtaposes conventions of pictorial origin their novel sculptural use. In affect we are looking at a collage that has been built up orthogonally to the support plane. El Guitar is constructed in such a manner that attached paper components are no longer glued parallel to what would be the pictorial field, but instead project off it.

El Guitar does not depict space but occupies it. Pictorial means become sculptural ends. The picture plane as a site for metaphorical space, an imagined window perhaps, is increasingly transformed into a more immanently literal two-dimensional work space for othogonally projecting planes.

As an object, El Guitar presents a new understanding of the relations between form and space which straddles the distinctions between the pictorial, sculptural, and installational. It enfolds the surrounding space into its own identity, its own form. Sculpture as a solid plenum-like enclosure containing volume surrounded by the empty void of space is displaced by the projecting and semi-enclosing planes of El Guitar. 

El Guitar is not simply illustratrative of nominalistic skepticism or a mere negation of the traditional categories. Rather it affirms a type of form which integrates form and space in an unprecedented way altogether. It becomes its own category.

By reducing form to a series of non-enclosing planes, it opens onto its surroundings. The water tight volume of sculpture no drains out into the world. The form of El Guitar disrupts and opens the enclosing skin-like surface plane of sculpture and establishes a mutually dependent interpenetration of plenum and void. In denying such clear cut, and now merely conventional distinctions, once finite boundaries become indeterminate. Is it collage, sculpture, or installation? It is El Guitar.

This  object was inspired by, but does not, simply illustrate a guitar. Guitar forms are largely a pretext to an investigation of form as such. That an actual guitar is a semi-enclosing sculptural skin whose hollow innards are perpetually exposed to view through its sound hole may have been absolutely central to the discovery of an interpenetrating arrangement of form and space.
Guitar as installed in Picasso's studio in 1913
Suggesting it's centrality, the current exhibition is keen to resuscitate the original context of the works on display. Upon entering the exhibition we enter Picasso's studio itself. Photographs of the studio (seen above) are blown up life size on the gallery walls. Presented alongside the actual works they depict, the photographs provide evidence of the mutual dependency of the composition of each work and their overall installed arrangement.

Nor were these arrangements definitive. Just as a single work precedes through a series of fits and starts, possibilities and alternatives, assertions and denials, Picasso reworked the arrangement of the overall hanging. The photographic reconstruction then allows us access to Picasso's itinerant thought process manifest in the fluctuating installation on his studio walls.

Guitar, Sheet Music, & Glass, 1912
Various forms of the guitar, depicted in Cubist shorthand, establish the relation between El Guitar, drawings, and collages. Produced and installed along side these related works, the studio photographs help initiate spectators into the creative evolution of El Guitar. It too was installed multiple ways: amongst related two-dimensional works, as well as with and without various sculptural components including a table top and other elements that suggest an integrated still life composition. The inclusion of exclusion of these elements push El Guitar either in the direction of installation or more toward relief sculpture. In every photographic reconstruction however, this total contexts was always as integral part of its forms.

El Guitar is not merely a guitar. It is a relational work rather than an essentialized autonomous entity. In one photograph from 1913 the forms of a guitar are continuous with  a cafe-like still life motif so often utilized in tow-dimensional works during the period. In effect this image illustrates a three-dimensional version of the papier collé Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass from November of the prior year.

Ultimately El Guitar is revealed as an installed work in dialogue with its surroundings, and not the free floating autonomous sculpture MoMa has presented its steel cousin as since it's acquisition by then curator William Rubin. For years the cardboard cousin had been displayed, if at all, without any elements beyond the guitar form itself including its cafe table bottom, advertising its as "sculpture" at the expense of its relational aspect to architectural space in general.
Picasso & William Rubin, 1971

The current exhibition was in fact prompted by the "discovery" of this semi-circular piece of cardboard at the behest of art historian Christine Poggi. Intimately amiliar with the photographic record herself, she was lead to ask: What happened to this essential component of the object? The real discovery may be that it had been in the museum's holdings all along but never displayed.

Even though Picasso himself displayed El Guitar with and without this element, and no installation can be considered definitive, evidence suggests its relational aspect was. At the time of its making El Guitar was never displayed without being integrated into a compositional structure beyond the isolated forms of a guitar alone. El Guitar is therefore, not a guitar. To lend further weight to this conclusion evidence can be found in the steel version itself. Permanently affixed to its bottom is a plane of steel signifying "table top" (but perhaps simultaneously "shadow" as well).

Vadimir Tatlin, Counter-Corner Relief, 1915
Related installations and all surviving photographs document the stress both Braque and Picasso placed on the creation of total installational environments for these new constructed confections. Both Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass, and the photographs of Braque's constructions all emphasize not single objects, but still lifes, objects set into an environment that is always suggested if even in the most abbreviated language. Braque even began to install these paper constructions in the corner of the studio, thereby activating both the third dimension and a more explicit dialogue with architectural space itself. It would be these works during Vladimir Tatlin's 1914 visit to Paris which would inspire his Counter-Corner Reliefs of 1915.
Georges Braque, Still Life Construction, 1914

Construction with Guitar Player and Violin  1913.





















For all the complexities of historical accuracy, the current installation hopes to be more faithful to Picasso's fluctuating original presentation in all its ambiguity. It is historically precise. Such contextualizing curatorial decisions suggest this condition as central, not accidental, to the meaning of the works as Picasso understood them.

Curators Anne Umland and Blair Hartzell, have dusted off the ideological overlay of the Rubin Era MoMa. In particular, his understanding stressed the cardpaper guitar with its ephemeral materials and construction, as a kind of rehersal maquette for the steel version which was to be the definitive performance. Yet here we are increasingly  confronted with the possibility that the steel guitar is something of a slightly stale, if more durable, coda for the more improvisational and tentative original.

While we need not be masters of suspicion, Rubin's neglect merits being brought into the light of day in the manner of the table top piece itself. And, of course, it is with our own present day emphasis on the ephemeral and relational in art that we more easily recognize Picasso's. Many of these constructions were discarded by the artists themselves, so it was a position even they couldn't stand by in resolute fashion.

Revealed is a collective investigation of form, aesthetically and semantically rich. The exhibit recuperates the open-endedness of Braque and Picasso's freewheeling exploration of form, material, and meaning leaving contemporary audiences with a "new" set of imaginative possibilities to discover and contemplate for themselves.

We are led to conclude that the cardpaper guitar was far from "nothing." In tearing down the tyranny of essentializing categories, El Guitar is certainly a most important historical "something" which will continue to have new ramifications and possibilities for future artists and audiences alike.
Guitar in steel after March 1914
Guitar as formerly installled as per Bill Rubin

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Ontic Priorities and the Image of Man in Art

 “He who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of the city, and so is either a beast or a god.”
                                                        - Aristotle, The Politics

“The faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past- he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God (‘child of God,’ ‘God-man)”
                                                                      - F. Nieztsche, The Genealogy of Morals
 
“The modern ontic turn away from man and God to nature thus in the end still assumes a continuing metaphysical and structural importance for the very categories it seeks to transcend.
                                                   -  Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity


            In what is perhaps the most important 20th century work of philosophy, Martin Heidegger made a famous distinction between the ontic and the ontological. The root for both terms comes from the Greek word for Being, “to on.” Both have to do with Being, or what “is.”
         The word "ontic" simply designates the description of Being and the relations between its various levels. These ontic levels are generally identified and distinguished as God, man, and nature. For those queasy at the mention of God, the ontically divine realm also includes any transcendent metaphysical principle like Plato's Ideas, Liebniz's Monad, Hegel's World Spirit, and even Marx's belief in the historical inevitability of the proletariat revolution. “Ontological,” on the other hand, refers to an analysis of the specific nature and properties of each realm.
                  Heidegger believed the entire history of philosophy was driven by the single question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” In 1927 his Being and Time hoped to explain dasein (the German translation of the Greek word for “Being”) as a function of time.  
      More recently, in 2008 a book titled The Theological Origins of Modernity, Duke professor of political philosophy Michael Allen Gillespie asserts that Modern philosophy has been nothing other than an attempt to resolve problems of priority between the three ontic realms originating in medieval theology.
       The crucial debate at that time was over the true nature of God. Answers cleaved into competing factions, the metaphysical realism of the Scholastics influenced by Aristotle, and the nominalism of William of Ockham. Gillespie makes the bold claim that this dispute, which will seem so antiquated to many of us Moderns, is the conflict that set Modern philosophy and Modernity itself in motion.
        At stake was the possibility of human reason to know God, and the ontic consequences of each answer. Simply put, each subsequent attempt to resolve the problem has altered our understanding of the relationship between the ontic three realms of Being. Each solution places an emphasis on one realm to the exclusion of another, or has resulted in the transference of attributes of one realm, say God, onto another, say man.  Gillespie's analysis concludes that Late Modern philosophy has attempted to translate God and man into nature while paradoxically remaining dependent on the distinctions between them.
While there is not space to do proper justice to Gillespie’s historically rigorous account, it reaches its apex in an ontic gloss on Kant’s Critiques. Kant was perhaps the most thoroughgoing and self consciously critical in attempting to properly situate the three realms. The essence of the three critiques is an attempt to circumscribe, order, and connect the realms and resolve the antinomy that had opened up between them. Identified as the phenomenal and the noumenal, the antinomy distinguishes the ironclad necessity of nature from man’s moral freedom and autonomy. Kant summed up the divide rather poetically as the “starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." 
The idea of human freedom is then, of course, inconsistent with the presuppositions and findings of natural science. Science sees a iron clad chain of causes and effects in which there can be no arbitrary "swerve," unmoved mover, break, and certainly no truly free will. Maybe scientists will one day see a "will" under a microscope. If so, it will be subject to the same physical laws as a falling rock. Did the rock move itself? From the scientific point of view, free will can be no more than ironic, a convenient fiction that gets us through our day. Even Nietzsche, who so struggled with the need for the idea of the Will, seems to have only ever been able to accept it, along with the first person pronoun, as a necessary illusion for life.
           Genuine human freedom and autonomy rest on the assumption, so often veiled, ignored, or suppressed, that man can somehow stand outside the processes of nature in determining his actions and his history. In the most direct formulation of the problem: How can man be free in one ontic realm and determined in another simultaneously? Can there be such slippage between the three realms? How can he have the autonomous freedom of God and the immanence of a biological machine? How can man freely give himself moral laws of action, if the physical and biological laws of movement are determined and immutable?
Historically speaking Kant’s reconciliation of the ontic realms, buffering man between God and animal, didn't stick. The history of philosophy, politics, and culture since has been an almost cataclysmic shuffling and reprioritizing of this trinity. The result has been a kaleidoscopic and perpetually shifting set of the images of human being ever since. This explosion of various ontic amalgamations of human being is intimately reflected in the history of art since that time.


The image of man found in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling is one of near perfection. In his ideal physique and proud posture Adam is envisioned as something like a pagan river god. His Adam is man as he was before the Fall. This is a state, I will venture, that no mere human has attained outside of artistic fiction. Like perhaps no other, the image marries the natural and divine elements thought to be combined within human nature itself. Even as Adam and Eve are escorted off the Edenic stage in the subsequent frame, they are not  portrayed with the pathos and shame of Masaccio’s exile. In the most famous panel Adam is the apparition of man as the imago dei, one made in God’s image.
        Through the idealization of his anatomy, so corporeal, Michelangelo suggests the body as merely the outward appearance of a partially divine inner nature. If the philosophical genius of Kant and Hegel couldn't manage this ontic synthesis, God could. The name “Adam” in the Hebrew Bible in not a proper noun, but is adamah. It literally means the “clay” to which God gave his spark, and in so doing reconciled the antinomious realms of the natural and the divine in that middling being man. 


As a learned Catholic who had studied at Ficino’s version of the Academia, Michelangelo was keenly aware of the Italian Humanist tradition while being no less inspired by Luther's Reformation. One of the central discrepancies between the Humanists and Reformers was the ontic priority of man in relation to God. How close or far was man from the divine? Each side would emphasize one half to the detriment of the other.
           Humanists like Pico Della Mirandola stressed man’s dignity, thereby raising his ontic status closer to God. For Miradola that divine spark made his nature indeterminate. As pure potential man could, existentially, make of himself almost anything he willed. In  contradistinction Luther repudiated this heresy by reasserting man’s falleness from the divine realm. For him man was a slave in bondage to an omnipotent God that he could not hope to know or understand rationally, but must have unquestioned faith in. For the Humanists man was an imago dei, closer to God than nature. For Reformers Man had fallen all too far toward terrestrial being to be so proud of his partly divine origins. Luther saw man in his hybris as the prodigal son who must humbly return to the true Father which is not the Catholic Church.
 Intimately aware of the theological debates of his day, Michelangelo would not have failed to glean the significance of his juggling act between the divine, human, and natural realms intrinsic to his depiction of the first man. Theologically significant is his navigation between the Scylla and Charbydis of the two extremes presented by the debate. In the Sistine ceiling man is neither a self-legislating God, nor a fallen animal. He is presented as that being whose dual nature, far from rending him in two, is harmoniously brought together in an exalted whole. However close Michelangelo may have come, man as depicted in the Sistine frescoes never storms heaven attempting to kill his Father.  
 That his Adam embodies a particular tincture of the three ontic realms, is hardly unique or unusual. The entire history of art can be understood in this light as a reflection of the juggling, and displacing of these realms in the image of man and the idea of the artist. The idealization of form and space in Renaissance art, for example, can never be properly understood if interpreted as a mere human projection, rather than the symbolic language for an orderly cosmos and the divinity which raises mankind in dominion over animals and Earth.
           The successive revaluations of ontic priority percolating since the Middle Ages are by no means linear over time or homogeneous within a given epoch. The history of art since the Middle Ages has evidenced a perpetual shell game of shifting ontic priorities, placing emphasis on one, then the another, and again the other. Each time an equilibrium seems imminent the balance is undone thus providing for the peculiar vitality of Western life, thought, and culture during what has come to be known as Modernity.
       For the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich nature was impregnated by the Holy Spirit in a manner not unlike the Virgin Mary herself. His paintings then were hardly intended as geographical transcriptions. For the Romantics generally Nature was not "matter in motion" understood empirically in the manner of a Hobbes or Descartes, but the revelation of God’s will itself. The vistas before which Friedrich’s ruckenfigurs  stand are not the “environment” or the “biosphere,” but the mysterious workings of God manifest in his creation. The idea of divine nature is still quite evident in Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a work inspired by Friedrich.
             Even with the demise of Romanticism, Nineteenth century art never consistently embraced the progressive Positivism so prevalent in European thought up to The Great War. For all their proto-Impressionistic concerns with nature and light, the work of Jean-Baptist-Camille Corot and the Barbizon School never depict nature a l’etat brut. It's not until Courbet and the Impressionists that the divine impulse is stripped from landscape depiction altogether.
        Post-impressionism however quickly reversed this positivistic impluse either by directly addressing the divine realm as exterior to them, or suggesting that it had been transferred inward, to the artist themselves as the demiurge creator of a whole new world to be revealed in their images. With Postimpressionism begins the inward turn that led to Modernism. The virtually divine powers of the human effectively replace nature as the source of creation.
      The symbol of the Symbolist’s might be nothing other than the material correspondent to the hidden God, the absentee Father who had absconded from man’s view in an age of Modern decadence. Ironically the Symbolists identified decline, not with bohemian aestheticism, but a positivistic society which identified progress with material, and technological advance. For these artists, in advancing forward man had fallen away.
            Even with the Impressionists the ontic status of the divine might well just be transferred to the human domain in their overriding concern for the vision of nature, not in-itself, but for the human sight and intuition. Nature is not seen objectively, qua nature, but rather as material for human perception and increasingly subjective interpretation. Impressionism becomes an exaltation of the human perspective on nature more than nature itself. In the late work of Monet this vision becomes increasingly subjective, and his paintings verge on creating a new pictorial world rather than representing an old one.
       In Postimpressionism divinity was increasingly transferred to the mind and passions of man in artists like Cézanne and Gauguin. Ironically Cézanne seems to deify Nature, yet acknowledged that at least some part of her is rationally comprehensible to the human imagination. To do “Poussin after nature,” seems to imply that the reverence for nature needs to be combined with the lights of constructive human visual comprehension. Cézanne married the forms of nature to the human categories of visual understanding such as the cone, cylinder, and sphere. The reception of Cézanne in Fauvism and Cubism seems to have disregarded his reverence for Nature and deified man's creative acts of construction.

           "Novelty is in the mind that creates, and not in nature, the thing painted.” - Eugène Delacroix

         The work and theory of Eugène Delacroix marks a decisive turn in Western art toward the intensified cultivation of human subjectivity. His emphasis on novelty and creativity was a radical heresy to the tradition of Classical art. Delacroix's subjectivism helped lead to the Modernist emphasis on novelty, human creativity, and the pictorial autonomy which results from them. Novelty is autonomy from the past, creativity is autonomy from the Newtonian laws. In the radical ontic distinction between man and nature the artist becomes the demiurge. For absolute pictorial autonomy to be taken seriously, man must become a god.  

“When religion, science and morality are shaken, when the external supports threaten to collapse, then man’s gaze turns away from the external towards himself.” – Kandinsky

 The Christian and quasi-Christian guises of God were not the primary masks the divine would take in Modernism. It was perhaps in the form of Man himself that god would achieve his apotheosis in Modern art. The death of god was the death in the belief of the sureties which unngirded the cosmic hierarchy of God, man, and nature. As a consequence if this death "man has been rolling from the center toward "x" as Nietzsche said." By the end of the 19th century even the faith in and veracity of science was being called into question in the work of Nietzsche, Weber, and Husserl.
             Only certain of his own existence, man was left homeless in the universe with only his own devices to guide him. As God recedes and "dies," human subjectivity becomes deified in Modernism in the form of autonomous freedom of expression. Modernity's attempt to conquer nature made man its master and possessor in a manner in which only God had been previously understood. In the fine arts man conquered nature by no longer being content to describe it. By prescribing form to nature through his imaginative and intellectual faculties he remade it in his own image.
           “Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, and believes  that it can  exist, in and for itself, without “things” (i.e. be nonobjective).”    
                                                      -Kasimir Malevich

         The practical autonomy the artist had gained from the church, state, and society was reflected in an increasingly autonomous image, now rent from the depiction of nature and its world of things as well. Piet Mondrian "plastic" form was a type of pictorial and sculptural language rent form the appearance and representation of nature. Plastic art did not mirrore nature but reflected the potentialities of the format and medium of painting itself intent on depicting cosmic harmonies that stood beyond the appearances of the natural world.
This tendancy reaches a pinnacle in Kasimir Malevich's Black Square. Born from emotion, his self styled school "Suprematisim" meant to represent the "supremacy of pure feeling." Feeling was not however an end in itself. Like Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian, subjectivity was the umbilical cord to the divine consmiczc realm. In this prevalent strain of Modernist abstraction, the image of God as it had been presented in the tradition of Christian art was iconoclastically effaced for a new, perhaps more universal, symbol of the Absolute.
  This deifying impulse strangely reaches its culmination in Abstract Expressionism. This movement was largely inspired by unveiling subconscious universal archetypes and a transcendent Sublime, yet culminates in a the watershed debate about the true nature of the work in Jackson Pollock. Pollock is, in the game of ontic priorities caught between a vision of free willing deified man, and as man reduced to an automatistic machine of nature, not consciously in control of the gestures he makes. 
 The narrative that he is completely free to actualize his will is closest to Harold Rosenberg’s canvassed drama, while man as nature is embodied in the automatistic unconscious vision of Pollock inspired by his contact with Surrealism. Caught between two giants of theory, Pollock himself was ambivalent about the final meaning of his work. Clement Greenberg’s vision walks a path somewhere between the between the two. The Apollinian and Dionysian suggest compositional control against a mediumistic being creating a work no different in kind from a sunset. A strict reading of Nietzsche’s idea’s from The Birth of Tragedy makes clear both alternatives reduce man to a mere mouth piece, or conduit like a Greek rhapsode, for divine or natural forces beyond his control, forces which he neither fully comprehends nor is fully conscious.
        Regardless of his final take on the Nietzschean binary, it is clear that Greenberg's conception of history is equally problematic. Inspired by Hegel and Marx, each artists operates in an historical context which is a progress of form from Manet, to Cézanne, to Picasso and Matisse, culminating in Pollock. While the latter Greenberg disowned the dialectical progressive view of history of his early writing, many of his most important articles are undergirded and structured by such a narrative.
       Like Hegel and Marx, Greenberg has a choice about how History truly progresses. Either it is the work of free willing men and their own conscious labors(a view which the determinism of science could not except). Or, people are moved by historical forces beyond their control to the “inevitable” telos. In the first example we have Man as God, the maker of his own destiny, and in the second we have History as a God, either a God working behind nature over time, or working as divine nature over time working toward a purpose.
The deification of man and his history runs through the 19th and 20th century thought and art. We now look down on this deification ironically, but that seems not to be how it was understood at the time. It was the hybris perceived in the deification of the artist and the work they created that lunched Post War art in the from of all the more anonymous schools such as Neo-Dada, Minimalism, Pop Art, and Concept and Word art.
       The Death of God ultimately meant the death of that divine spark in man and his translation back into nature. The perceived failure of Modern autonomy in art and ideas thus ushered in the “Post-Human” era. Now the individual artist and their “expression,” were translated into determing social, linguistic, or economic games which the individual was unable to achieve autonomy from or transcend.
          The divide between the humanistic and the posthuman emerges in the contrast between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, where the authentic genius is juxtaposed to the ironic genius. The authentic genius subjectively creates masterpieces, while the ironic genius presents us ready-made images speaking not of interior or biographical states, but ubiquitous social and economic realities patently transparent to the any person. The Newman or Rothko hopes to transcend the everyday and arrive at the Sublime, whereas the Warhol denies that possibility by intending to remain immanently within banal everyday economic realities. So goes the Warholian syllogism: Clement Greenberg likes Coke and so do you, and you can understand a Warhol just like Clement Greenberg.
In this transformation from what has often been called Modernism to Postmodernism the possibility of man’s transcendence to the divine was thwarted or denied. The use of chance in Dada and Postmodern art is the reduction of man to a unconscious conduit for nature. Through chance man is translated back into nature and his intentionality made ironic.
         The "death of God" does not necessarily result in the deification of man but in the breakdown of the ontic heirarchy in the form of nihilism. Nihilism means the transformation of ontic concers from a vertical to a horizontal orientation. Eventually God and Nature were jettison altogether and art was only left with historical conventions  lacking all necessity or intrinsic value. Art became a linguistic game. Initiated by Duchamp, art is only what a social group decides to call it. Like the findings of natural science, perhaps true, but a deadly truth.
       Man was not made in the image of God, but God made in the image of man motivated by an aberrant psychology in need of psychoanalytic adjustment. Transcendence today, for cosmopolitan society is sheer farce, either false humility, hybris, or unconscious self-aggrandizement. There are innumerable reasons and motivations for severing ourselves from the divine, but the result has been a serious diminution in the possibility and number of great themes in art.
       Principles are reduced to ideologies, intentions mere rationalizations for unconscious drives, the figure to the body, the artist to the businessman, the masterpiece to the market-piece. By reducing man to pure immanence and denying transcendence, the great themes of art have been radically attenuated and any attempt to address such themes is seen as misguided, anachronistic, parochial, or just all of the above.Hasn't one heard old man, that god is dead?!
Reducing man to pure immanence, translating him back into nature, seems consistent with natural science and our liberal political tendencies. Yet it is well documented in blood and bodies, that returning man to a theoretical state of nature has led to much disenchantment in Modernity. This has been described by Robert Pippin as the philosophical problem of the time. Simultaneous with the conquest of reason in the industrial and French revolutions, was the emergence of counter-revolutionary forces such as Romanticism which questioned the capacity of modern reason to adequately provide a robust and satisfying account of human existence. This disenchantment continued in the varied forms of Romanticism, Modernism, even Postmodernism in the aesthetic realm, and Marxism, Fascism, Communism, Existentialism, and Poststructuralism in the theoretical realm. Disenchantment with Modern reductionism is now clearly evident in Islamic extremism as a result of the inroads made by liberalism and capitalism in the Middle East.
             Yet the liberal belief in progress and self-legislating moral freedom, however wholesome it may be, can only be justified and explained, if not by the belief in God, by some nugget of divinity self-evidently found in human Being which might extricate it from nature's necessity. Will science find that nugget?
              This is no mere theoretical exercise. The manner in which we orchestrate the ontic realms will have direct consequences on political organization and the treatment of other beings. Recently the United Nations tabled a motion to give rights to the Earth and all her nonhuman inhabitants.
             Is it hybris for man to grant himself ontic priority over the animals in the modern rights game? Will our neglect of the rights of animals which balance the world's ecosystems lead to our own demise? We can gladly acknowledge the mechanical nature of man on way to the emergency room, but wonder if anyone can live by that truth alone. Who seriously acts as if they are merely biological matter in motion? Even if we do act that way as per natural necessity, we certainly do not, or can not consistently think that way.
          We may surely be able to surpress our use of the word "God" in the jargon of various philosophical discourses and related language games. We cannot however be so sure that in this attempted elimination of the ontically divine, we haven't merely transferred the ontic attributes of the divine realm onto other apparently mundane and imminent signifiers. A good liberal himself, Gillespie believes we'll have to extend our liberality to God in our discussion of ontic priorities if we are to get out of the well dug trenches of today’s thought.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Nothing, Nothing, Something

A group of text based works by Joseph Kosuth are currently on view at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Language based Concept art has always intrigued me, so I was pleased to contemplate the “Nothing Paintings" selected from his well known series 'Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)’. These ten wall works present the idea of “Nothing” in paradoxically tangible form. 

Nothing is present in a series of 4’ x 4’ square format works on which definitions of the word “nothing” appear in white text on a black ground. Definitions range from one sentence to more extended meanings including literary usages of the word. Encountering them is like happening upon a Kosuthian grammar lesson on a classroom blackboard.

As his primary medium, Kosuth has long employed text to question traditional aesthetics and challenge the notion that the physical manifestation of an artwork is its essence. The format is derived from painting, but conventional materials are substituted for mounted photographs on paper. Is it even appropriate to call them images? Unlike a painting each presents dictionary text through photographic reproduction. Unlike a dictionary they isolate single word entries on the scale of painting and the aesthetic of minimalist abstraction. Hung like paintings, but without half tones, gestural marks, color or texture, they employ the visual language of print material. Operating between the two, how then, are they to be “read,” as text, or formally, as abecedarian abstractions?
However reductive, Kosuth does not fail to neglect visual concerns altogether. There is a controlling minimal aesthetic throughout. Careful arrangement is evident in their uniform installation, composition, and color. All text is systematically centered on a void ground and the group coalesces into a total unit. Their austere surfaces and equidistant spacing call to mind the serial works of Donald Judd.   
This anonymous format seeks to question the assumption of the artist as the special creator of a special kind of object. Here the artist becomes nothing. As mechanical reproductions they undermine or deny the supposed originality of the artist and the work they produce. Absent signs of manual intervention, the artist becomes a non-presence. Now the artist exists invisibly behind acts of selection and presentation of ready-made ideas. This is not creation ex nihilo.
 Ironically these works come with a certificate of ownership (not to be exhibited) which thereby advertises each, not merely as a unique objet d’art, but a genuine Kosuth. Does such documentation elevate them to the dignity of art? The provenance of Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein is apparent here. Yet those producers served up such writs with tongue in cheek. Perhaps these certificates undermine the very principles of Concept art by exposing its status as a commodity. Idea becomes object, art-value devolves into exchange-value. Am I buying an object or an idea?  It’s pleasantly absurd to ponder purchasing “Nothing.” Will I get something for my money?



Ironically “Nothing” is some-thing. “Nothing” exists as the work itself and the text found on it. Yet, the various physical manifestations of “nothing” can never fully point to the true meaning of no-thing. The being of nothing is an absence, a lack, a visual and material non-presence. Nothing is an “is not.” Following this logic, just writing “nothing” becomes tantalizing! The immaterial idea perpetually gets trapped and contradicted in its mediating form. This is an oft criticized dilemma of concept art but we might rather see it as a fruitfully vexing predicament to ponder.
Underlying appearances is an idea to which each definition refers. By emphasizing the intangible, word art hopes to become a libretto to be read silently or aloud where the true artwork is reconstituted as an idea in the viewer’s mind. Kosuth’s verbal intention and minimal aesthetic effectively displace visual concerns and art is transformed from object to idea as invisible thought displaces retinal sensation.    
Art, that is concept art, that is an Idea, has an intrinsic tension then between materiality and the content to which materiality can only attempt to point. Semantic reference is thwarted. A rupture emerges between object and idea. Kosuth manipulates this disparity throughout this series providing us, for example, with a definition of “Art” which looks nothing like the meaning of the given textual description. The gap between idea and object in these works becomes a microcosm for the hoped for global break Kosuth sought between his word based oeuvre, and the entire image based tradition he sought to repudiate. Past and present, symbol and referent, both inextricably rent in two.
All in all these works don’t fail signify “nothing,” visually and conceptually, as the text might suggest.

Another text work of literary inspiration is Ulysses, 18 Titles and Hours from 1998. The names of Joyce’s eighteen characters which form the titles of the book’s chapters ornament the gallery walls in neon. Time stamps appended to each reify the novel’s non-linear narrative time in concrete form.  To epic effect, Kosuth scatters the eponymous words as the visual analog to Joyce’s streams of consciousness. Visual text and temporal performance are brought together as Kosuth’s formal arrangement captures the textual cadences of Mallarmé’s A Coup de Dés



            Lastly is a new installation which runs along the perimeter of the ceiling of the central exhibition space. Here one enters the void of Samuel Beckett’s literary psyche as his fragments  text festoon the walls. Beckett’s literary consciousness ramifies across one’s visual field as a stream of words. 


Called 'Texts (Waiting for-) Nothing',  the title is a play on Beckett’s most famous work. Stop waiting and go see this exhibition before it closes on April 30.  But beware, once trapped in the abyss of language, there may be no exit!