Arguing for a Long Look at Emily Dickinson

I came across an article on Agnes Martin and Gertrude Stein. Since they are my heroes, I stopped everything I was doing -- working on Emily Dickinson -- to read “The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans,” by Brendan Prendeville (Oxford Art Journal, 31:1, 2008, pp. 53-73).  Prendeville is questioning the way the artist makes her work, and, in a kind of mirror image, how that directs the way the audience perceives the work of art.

He begins by showing us Agnes Martin’s “Little Sister,” from 1962, (not re-printable: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/5653)... The painting is oil, ink and brass nails on canvas and wood. Martin’s paintings do not reproduce well. They are horizontal ruled lines, in soft penciled greys and whites, usually, and they are very subtle. Here is "Untitled," an 11" square, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper, from 1995:

If you have ever seen Martin’s work for yourself, you know that one of Prendeville’s threaded arguments in this article is true. He finds two views of any given painting: the one you see from across the room, which will look like a regular 5-foot or 6-foot square, seeming perfectly angular, with measured marks. Then there is the one you see when you get close, close enough to touch the canvas; you see the hesitations, the pencil marks, the times the pencil slid almost imperceptibly out of grip, the ever-so-slight deviations, almost like little breaths. Prendeville calls these “the trace of her actions” (54).

He uses Stein in this essay as she relates to this mark-making of Martin’s: Stein was interested in what she called “the continuous present,” which Prendeville describes as “the present as we live it now, making it as we make it; the reader of a Stein text participates in its making of the present” (and he cites Ulla Dydo, to whom we are all indebted for a better understanding of Stein, 69).  The “making” is something we see in Stein, and we see it through her repetitions and her insistence on seeing the object....

Voilà. When we get close to an Agnes Martin, when we read a Gertrude Stein sentence or poem aloud, we are following the maker’s trail. And by the way we respond, do we “make” the piece, too? This makes Prendeville uncomfortable, as it should; doesn’t the artist have any more control than that? And so he asks: “Under what conditions and by what means is a non-arbitrary response to a work possible, when the maker of the work has not aimed to prompt any response?” (56).

Exactly. The audience. How to control them?

As I mentioned, I have been reading Emily Dickinson... She discussed her work in letters, sent a few to friends, and perhaps a dozen or so poems were published in her lifetime.  There is strong evidence that she did not seek traditional publication: “If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase – My Barefoot-Rank is better—“ (letter to T.W. Higginson, June 1862). When Dickinson died, her sister found 40 bound packets, known to scholars now as “fascicles,” roughly 5” x 8,” consisting of folded leaves of paper tied together with string, and several poems were hand-copied and bound into each fascicle.  In the very first editing of Dickinson’s work, the fascicles were all disbound. One of the transcribers ripped out passages in the poems and letters, and inked over one full poem.  Other editors replaced words, changed the appearance on the page of poems, and created “normal” punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.  Even the most well-intentioned scholars and editors cannot un-alter Emily Dickinson’s life and work.

And these, we are given to believe, are the good guys, the people who brought you the poems.  We cannot know how to find our way back.  There is no thesaurus, no key.

There isn’t for Agnes Martin, either. Prendeville argues that Martin’s models were Pollock, Rothko and Newman. He says, though, that in their paintings, these artists were not pursuing “recognizable common reference.” Each painting, “in its abstractness... withheld itself and, still more, enacted on the part of the viewer a committed act of attention – a personal commitment .... meaning needed to be elicited” (57).  And so it is with Martin. She demands that we stop and stand and commit. We have to see her hesitating pencil lines.

And who else hesitates? Emily Dickinson. Think of the way the words (when they are presented truly, or when you look at a manuscript) scatter across the page like rising birds. Think of her dashes, which appear in the ms. as dots, and her refusal to use titles or numbers. Here is my transcription of one of her poems from her handwriting. Note the hesitations, the way we are forced to take special care with both words and spaces:

I saw no way – the

Heavens were stitched –

I felt the Columns close.

The earth reversed her

Hemispheres –

I touched the Universe.

And back it slid.

And I alone –

A speck upon a Ball

Went out upon Circum-

ference

Beyond the dip of Bell.

Emily Dickinson wrote to her mentor  T.W. Higginson (and later editor and changer of words) that “My Business is Circumference” (July 1862). And here she is in her poetry, defying the stitchery, riding out upon “Circumference,” far away from mortal sight or sound (a strange thing for this poet to wish for), she who, in life, went only as far as Boston.

Susan Howe, in her fabulous My Emily Dickinson, takes on the stereotype of the sheltered and strange “Miss Dickinson”:

[She] took the scraps from the separate ‘higher’ female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined them with voracious and ‘unladylike’ outside reading.... She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders.... a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer.... He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition.... if we concern ourselves with the deepest Reality, is this world of the imagination the same for men and women? What voice when we hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us? (21-22)

What voice, indeed? [Think too of the hesitations and repetitions built into a David Mamet play – the hesitations, in his hands, of men]. Who is this audience standing on (what Prendeville calls) such “uncertain ground” (58)? And what are our responsibilities?

Prendeville writes that, as we stand close to an Agnes Martin, “our instinctive focusing of attention, to discern something in the thing attended to, is in some way thwarted, or deflected....” There is no “resolution,” only an “overall ‘dissonance’” (65).  Yes, and this is the thing about our readings of Emily Dickinson; we all work to “resolve,” but as we do, we cram her poems into categories, as her first editors did (“flower” poems or “death” poems).  She wasn’t categorize-able, didn’t want to be pushed into the sewing corner. She was aiming at dissonance, too: I read “Beyond the dip of Bell” several times before I heard it as the stilled buoy or clapper.  This use of “dip” is the only time I can find it performing this function, a physical way of calling to our attention an auditory anomaly. There are easier ways to say what was said here. Her world was constricted. Her language and her form are not.

We have to take care. Prendeville ends by saying that “to be drawn close” to a Martin painting “is to apprehend her care in making the painting, and to assume the posture of care and affectionate concern oneself .... [her work] vindicates intimacy” (71).

A reader of Dickinson’s poetry must wander into it on her terms.  The poet’s brother, Austin Dickinson, the keeper of his sister’s purse, influenced one of the first sets of transcriptions of her poems. His mistress, Mabel Todd Lewis, copied out poems, making them available soon after the poet’s death, but she also inked over at least one entire poem 

and omitted or cut out phrases or stanzas or sentences in poems or letters, all because Dickinson spoke too warmly of Austin Dickinson’s wife, Susan.  Was she assuming a romantic love? Was she just jealous of their friendship, she who had never met the poet? Or was she asserting her power?

We must not do any of these things. We cannot project, reject, cross-out or compartmentalize Emily Dickinson. because that has all already happened. We must start again. We must place ourselves before her handwriting and find her mark-making... and try and listen "Beyond the dip of Bell."

[Thanks to Brendan Prendeman, to Susan Howe, and to Amherst College. I have created a work on Dickinson, called "Missing Emily," for the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art's Altered Book and Book Arts Exhibition. Find your way there... and help Marin MOCA].

Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, the Cathedral, and Regrets

The mind cannot always live in a 'divine ether.' The lark cannot always sing at heaven's gate. There must exist a place to spring from -- a refuge from the heights, an anchorage of thought. Study gives this anchorage: study ties you down; and it is the occasional willful release from this voluntary bond that gives the soul its occasional overpowering sense of lyric freedom and effort.  Study is the resting place -- poetry the adventure" 
(Wallace Stevens, from his journal, 1899).

I like it best when the lark sings at heaven’s gate... but, for whatever reason, it isn’t – it actually can’t be -- a constant thing. “And why not?”  you ask.  I can’t be in the studio for too many hours; I begin to make mistakes, because I need time away from the work, too. The “adventure” that is poetry or painting needs its preparatory and anticipatory phases, and needs to be remembered and re-collected so that it can be faced again, with new energy, another day. The “ether” is a demanding state of mind, and needs every artist to approach it ... with great care.

1. Gimme Shelter

One definition of being “ether” is to burn, or to shine; humans can remain in an ecstatic state for only so long. Our son sent us a lovely essay by John Le Carré on Philip Seymour Hoffman. Here is a short excerpt:

A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you .... Philip took vivid stock of everything, all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle. He had to screw up his eyes or be dazzled to death .... Philip was burning himself out before your eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course, and in bursts of startling intimacy he needed you to know it. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/movies/john-le-carre-on-philip-seymour-hoffman.html)

Le Carré suggests that Hoffman was all too aware of the dangerous pull of the dazzle. It would be very difficult, if Le Carré is right, for Hoffman -- or any truly empathetic receptor -- to shut down all the systems. It would be possible, I am guessing, to think that, once shut down, the senses may not -- ever again -- open back up. But it is a risk, leaving yourself so open to the brightest of lights; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said “but this is my solitude, that I am girded round with light” (“Night Song”).  There’s a loneliness in being in the artistic avant-garde, and it can kill.

A lucky few can shut down the systems, and then they have learned the ways to open themselves up: one method is the choice of solitude. Agnes Martin finally settled into artistic isolation, finding her artistic voice in New Mexico.

you don’t have to worry

if you can imagine that you’re a rock

all your troubles fall away

It’s consolation

Sand is better

You’re so much smaller as a grain of sand

We are so much less

These paintings are about freedom from the cares of this world

from worldliness ....

Don’t look at the stars

Then your mind goes freely – way, way beyond  (Writings, pp. 39-40)

Martin was open, but open to her own mind, her own path. Martin saw herself as small, her art as the big thing. She wanted to find what she called “classic” truth in her art, an objective vision. For that, she says, she can only “turn to perfection as I see it in my mind, and as I also see it with my eyes even in the dust” (16).

Agnes Martin advised that “innocence” of the mind, of play, “must be protected as the source” of her art, of her life (139). Innocence is not something grown-ups tend to pursue, but Martin says that’s what there is, that’s all there is. She went into her mind so deeply to find that innocence and renew it -- in paint.

My husband is currently reading James Lee Burke’s Pegasus Descending, a well-written whodunit (with pretty tough villains). One of the characters says

You got to remember who you are so you don’t become like the people around you. Each night you tell yourself over and over you got a special place inside you where you live. It’s like a private cathedral no one can touch. That’s the secret to sanity... But you can’t tell anyone about your special place .... Because once they know you got that special place in your head, they’ll strap you down and kill your brain cells with electroshock (p. 171).

Maybe you don’t need to worry very much about “the people around” you -- and that little “electroshock” threat should be seen as perfect Burkean overkill. But the cathedral inside you that “no one can touch”?  It has to be there. That “place inside you where you live” keeps you happy in your own skin, and able and willing to face another day, as Burke’s character knows. We all look for that “secret to sanity.” Agnes Martin tells us it is in one’s own mind, if we can just hold still enough to find it. James Lee Burke -- whose art could not be more different from hers -- says it’s in there, too.

Here is a painting of mine that plays on the idea that "Everyone, Inside, is a Cathedral":

But then there’s an artist like Jasper Johns. He doesn’t talk much about his artistic sources, and people apparently see that as a challenge. A small book of photographs of Johns’s work was published by Rizzoli in 1997. The book’s only text is by Leo Castelli, who has known Jasper Johns since signing him in 1957 to his gallery and thus into art-world stardom. Here are a few excerpts from Castelli’s essay:

*”How else can we explain...” (7)

*” ...the artist seems to be...” (7)

*”... the artist places within our reach new, enigmatic elements... I believe that these elements reflect a sense of theatricality...” (12)

*”... they carry a message that we must decipher...” (13)

* “I am convinced...” (13)

*”the Mona Lisa that we find... can scarcely be anything but...” (italics mine; 14)

We can see only hesitation, guesswork and great distance from Jasper Johns in Castelli’s remarks. Over 40 years, and Johns has not let him in.

2. Must We Dig Straight On Through the Canvas?

In her book on Jasper Johns, teasingly called Privileged Information, Jill Johnston concludes that  John’s art,

considered as a whole ... can look like a giant collage of cross-references, of narratives inside narratives, or narratives completed by linkages from painting to painting, close or far in time – some guiding core story tied up secretly within (53).

There’s a story in there somewhere, Johnston insists; she wants to find that “guiding core story.”  Perhaps because of her dedication to tracking that “story” down, Jasper Johns refused permission for Johnston to reproduce any photographs of his art in her book about his work.

This limitation on Johnston leads her to talk about the images in the abstract, and, then, the artist in the particular. In one section, Johnston discusses Johns’s sexual partners, something no-one needs to do in relation to the art, and then moves on to link perceived personal loss to a series of works that Johns had begun in the 1980’s, works that included traced outlines of figures. Critics found the source, eventually; it was the amazing Isenheim Altarpiece. Johns says of his initial impulse that

‘I thought how moving it would be to extract the abstract quality of the work, its patterning, from the figurative meaning. So I started making these tracings. Some became illegible in terms of the figuration, while in others I could not get rid of the figure. But in all of them I was trying to uncover something else in the work, some other kind of meaning.’ ....  [And Johnston then asks] What ‘other kind of meaning was he after?’ (283-5)

The source of the tracings found, Johnston is now after a meaning. But look at what Johns has actually said:  he is moved to extract the patterns from Grünewald’s original story. That is, the pattern is no longer part of the narrative, because Johns pulls it out and it’s now free-floating. That’s the point ... a fallen soldier becomes just an outline, perhaps like the lines of a radiator. Let me explain.

Michael Crichton has written a very thorough book on Johns, with photographs, and quotes him:

Early in his career, he said people should be able to look at a painting ‘the same way you look at a radiator .... No special vision or knowledge was required (32)

But to Johnston, the idea that, sometimes, a line is just a line, is just not it. About the dead-end she has reached with the Grünewald figure, she writes

In his paranoia, Johns has emphasized the importance of the figures’ identity himself .... Feeling cornered, Johns cornered himself, threw a blanket over his head and yelled a muffled image from inside: ‘I know who I am, but you’ll never see or find me. Anyway the pattern on the blanket that covers me is really all there is. I’m dead, these are my remains’ (italics are Johnston’s; p. 285).

Jasper Johns is not speaking, there is no corner, no blanket, Johns is not dead, and there are no “remains.” Clearly, Johnston has run into a wall, and isn’t fond of the after-effects.

Back to our radiator-friendly critic, then.  Michael Crichton’s introduction to his book JASPER JOHNS, (first published in 1977, reprinted in an expanded 1994 edition), begins with a quotation from the psychologist Jerome Bruner:

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art (p. 6).

The effort to explain the experience can disturb the experience. The work itself is the thing. We might turn to the critics at our leisure, but should not before we have  encountered the work on our own and found our own responses.

Hasn’t Johns said – or not said anything but -- that, over and over? The work is the thing. And yet, the critics’ need to explain is palpable. The idea that they possess a set of insights about a given art work that only they can articulate constitutes the core of their art-world identities.  

Not Crichton, who offers process and a sight of the surface of the artist’s works. He finds leitmotifs, but leaves calmly: enough has been said. 

John Yau is similarly clear and clean in his A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns. Yau quotes Scott Rothkopf, who says the critics embarked on an “iconographic truffle hunt” when faced with the paintings of the 1990’s (note 3, page 178).  Yau concludes that

Once we try to read Johns’s iconographically, we inevitably become lost .... The motifs are not symbols to be decoded, but, as Johns wrote in his ‘Sketchbook Notes,’ ‘things’ placed in a ‘continuity of some sort ...’  where there are no boundaries between the ‘space’ and the ‘objects.’  .... For Johns it seems that ‘continuity is reality, a realm of invariable change and transformation. Nothing is fixed or permanent” 

                        --A Thing Among, (p. 166)

Yau goes on to say that this sense of continuity is Johns’s ‘sense of life”: the absence of boundaries, change, seen through his eyes, and placed in his paintings, and seen with the visitors’ senses (166).  No absolutes. Yau says “we should resist” narrative as we look at these paintings (192).

3.  “Regrets”

New York’s Museum of Modern Art curators, Christopher Cherix and Ann Temkin, visited Jasper Johns last year in his studio, saw the body of work on the walls, and hastily arranged an exhibition of the work, “Regrets” at MOMA, showing right now. I’m on the wrong coast to see it, but I now do have the catalogue, with a splendid essay by Cherix and Temkin.  The title for the show comes from a stamp Johns developed to answer invitations: the word “regrets,” and a signature. He has silk-screened the original stamp to embed in the works of this series, and here it is from the upper corner of "Study for Regrets":

The curators begin their discussion by saying that “for Johns, the painting’s subject is the painting” (11).  It isn’t some abiding “guiding core story,” but changing approaches, and changing results.

This series of works begins with a photograph printed in a Christie’s auction catalogue. The photo portrays Lucian Freud as he turned awkwardly away, all angles, from the camera. Francis Bacon had commissioned the photograph from his friend John John Deakin, and it became the base for an oil “Study for Self-Portrait” – with Freud’s body and Bacon’s head -- before spending rather a lot of time on the floor of Bacon’s studio.

Johns apparently likes the idea of an upturned, overturned, caught-in-space body, because it gives him great lines to play with in his paintings. Here are the two astonished soldiers at the base of the “Resurrection” panel of the Isenheim altarpiece, followed by the Freud photograph:

And here is “Perilous Night,” with the red outlines of the soldiers’ bodies on the left, followed by “Study for Regrets,” which inverts the photo of Freud at left, and reproduces the outlines as they were photographed, at right, from the show’s catalogue, (Plate One, with my reading notes):

Some of the works in this series are “undeniably physical,” the curators tell us, as they reproduce “Regrets,” a charcoal, watercolor and pastel drawing, which should be studied “inch by inch” (27). Here is a detail:

This catalogue, and exhibition, give us Johns’s unfolding process over 18 months. But the curators say, “like all great works, they remain ultimately unknowable. They create a constellation of potential meanings as intricate as the very materials that compose them” (32).

Fun as the “truffle hunt” sometimes can be, this is as close as we will ever get, as close as we should get, to Johns’s cathedral.

"Anything is a Mirror": "Vexed Endings" at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

We have moved to Dublin, Ireland, for three months of visiting (our daughter and her boyfriend live here) and to find a new perspective on art-making and viewing.

A compelling show to start: an exhibition of six artists called “Vexed Endings” at The Green On Red Gallery (a beautiful, bright loft space at 26-28 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2, through August 25^th). The title implies that works are incomplete until … perhaps now, when the viewer sees them, or perhaps not entirely, ever: the gallery statement says that the works here “tend toward a material condition or conceptual state that is unstable, open-ended, and incomplete …. [the] process is not concluded and very much alive or ongoing …. The room for the viewer is ample and central.”

“Unstable, open-ended, and incomplete” like light through a window … it isn’t all the available light, we know that, but it’s the light we can see … and then it shifts.  The collected works of “Vexed Endings” change with the light and with the position of the viewer. They seem to me all about reflected light, which we don’t always notice.  It reminds me of the way light works in this Vermeer, “Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid,” which we saw at the National Gallery of Ireland (permission pending; see www.national gallery.ie for their photograph).

We can see the source of the light, the window, and the women’s bodies it touches; we can sense that the maid would far rather be out in the world (where she is looking) and that the woman writing seems totally caught up in her letter. Then we can see a folded and discarded letter, lit by that same sun, on the floor; perhaps that is the letter the woman is answering so intently. The upper half of the window appears to hold clearer glass, and the sun is high enough in the sky to concentrate mostly on that higher pane. Looking again, we see that the green drapes at the left margin are lit, too, so there is another window lighting them (probably the window depicted in Vermeer’s “Music Lesson”).  The light here is shown as a single moment and we can almost trace the line from the source of that light to the forms it lights.

The works in “Vexed Endings” intensify that line because they show it shifting; for these works, it isn’t just a single moment. The line changes for as long as the viewer is in the gallery.

A photograph, “Reflecting 1 (6^th Generation)” by Philomene Pirecki illustrates this shift in light; the work isn’t framed, and hangs loose on the wall, leading me to photograph it from two different angles, front (where I am the black form at left) and the side:

This is an abstract print (50.8 x 40.5 cm) that shifts, as you can see from these two pictures, depending on where we are in relation to it and to the light.  A second print of the same size, “Reflecting 3 (4^th Generation)” appears to offer a little more certainty:

The artist’s studio, we think.  But each time we look, that line between the source of light and the object moves, and we are no longer certain what we are seeing.  This is, it seems to me, the essence of abstract work, that it forces us to see what we cannot actually know.  Pirecki is showing two paintings as well, but I was most intrigued by another work, “Equivalence (Copper, 3)” set on the floor that I photographed from above:

The thing itself, and its portrait. The lines of the floorboards are clearly reflected in the copper, and somewhat less clearly in the print; here, and not-here.

Dennis McNulty trained as an engineer and is a musician; his “Circuits”trails an electric wire across the floor to a digital reading that almost, but never quite, spells out the character for infinity:

The base of the piece is stacked concrete and the top, draped soft plastic, catches reflective light as it tries to create its own meaning, lit from within.  Another McNulty installation reflects light from the gallery windows and visitors and changes as we circle it. Here is my photograph of  “The time inside (the spoil)”:

The title seems to suggest the deliberate imperfections of the piece: the film twists away from the glass, as if trapped by heat or light.  I liked the way this piece brings the “outside” in.

My favorite two pieces from this show are the pair of etchings, “For Now 1” and “For Now 2,” by John Graham:

The lines have been slowly and carefully crossed, then printed, black lines against a white surface (referring back to Agnes Martin) and as we look we can see the gallery reflected:

 Or the viewer:

The lines weave in and out, gaining volume, almost becoming three-dimensional fabric.  The two prints are very similar, but the artist stresses that they are not the same; there are delicate lines across the top of the horizontal and vertical patterns so that the light is not caught in quite the same way in each form.  I kept coming back to these two; they have a calm and contented presence.

It’s John Graham’s fault that I am reminded of Agnes Martin, who wrote “Anything is a mirror…. There are two endless directions. In and out.” 

Thanks to Jerome O Drisceoil for his help! Go and see the show if you are in Dublin (there are many more fine works that I didn't get to here) and see for yourself the “In and out.”

San Francisco: The “Angular Invariability” of Day or “Groping in the Darkness” of Night?

I don’t mean when artists work. I mean… how.  I would like to propose two categories, ways of thinking about the way art is made: DAY or NIGHT.  (I like the way these seem like opposites, but as Keith Richards wrote in his song “Slipping Away,” it’s “First the sun and then the moon. One of them will be around soon….”)

Day

This morning there was a clear silver-blue cloudy light over the Bay, the basic white light that alerts us all: it’s time to get to work. Some artists work best in this bright light of day and find stability, continuity, a kind of plotline managed through repetition, a plan approaching a blueprint.

SFMOMA has been exhibiting the notes (and lots of other things, but it is the notes that got me) of Buckminster Fuller.  He wrote a brief definition of STABILITY on an index card:  “A necklace is unstable. The lengths of the beads in a necklace do not change. Only the angles between them change. Stability refers only to angular invariability.” Surrounding this quote were endless cards with formulas and diagrams. We could probably find other ways to define stability, but stay with this idea, this single idea, just for a moment. And then think about painters who have chosen to work with “angular invariability.”  The bright light of day and of persistence, image(s) seen in the mind, a sketch in full bloom, played large on canvas. Ellsworth Kelly, for example, in this painting, “Il Cerf Volant,” looked for a particular “fit” of image and space:

Kelly said of his work that “I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space …” I hear a formal declaration here. As a painter, I see this as Kelly describing a path, a path followed in painting after painting. Agnes Martin, even more clearly, insisted that she did not begin a painting until she saw it first, entire, in her mind; here is her “Friendship,” from 1963:

Daylight, the repeated gesture, each line a familiar presence, but each its own presence.  Martin said that her works were really about “innocence,” and there is a kind of innocence in her following each gesture with another just like it until the work is completed. You can trace her progress; we can see the time she took.  

As we visited galleries in San Francisco, I found several artists who follow this architectural structure as they paint. One artist, who marks over graph paper, Indira Martina Morre, says she uses the images she sees on computer screens:  “Dots, circles, lines, crosses, arrows, … networks … departing onto canvas where it all disintegrates to become a psychological map, to become a hand-made document of a presence in time, to become a mark” (artist’s statement, http://indiramorre.com).  Here is one of her works representative of those we saw at K. Imperial Fine Art, this image from her site:

The characters Morre chooses are carefully delineated; the soft paint around them diminishes the contrast between each mark and the “screen” or background here…. The fading towards the bottom gives you a sense of perspective from across the room.  Morre says: “Rendering perfect, utilitarian, and timeless signs by hand is a consequence of my desire to access an imperfect, contradictory, time-bound being on the other side of a screen” (artist’s statement on her site).  This “rendering” takes considerable forethought and time, just as Agnes Martin’s did.  Another artist whose marks add up is Teo Gonzalez at Brian Gross Fine Art; here is his “Untitled #618” from 2012 (the photograph is from http://www.briangrossfineart.com/artists/tgonzalez:

We can see calm and perfection here; time, the time taken to create the work, slows and passes.  From a distance Gonzalez’s work, like Morre’s, takes on a softness, but, also like Morre’s paintings, Gonzalez’s paintings change subtly when viewed close-up: we can see the surface bristle and shimmer with each little mark, as we can see here in my "detail" photo:

Judith Foosaner, also at Brian Gross, repeats motifs, here by stopping and starting with forms that seem torn and re-grouped from a precision die-cutter. Here is my photograph of “Breaking and Entering #17,"  36” x 72” collage and acrylic on canvas:

This seems to me to echo Picasso’s “Guernica,” in its majesty and its carefully-blocked spaces. Here is a detail:

There is a steady movement here, a planned progress, that has then been deliberately undercut in the tough light of day.

A different kind of daylight comes about in Patrick Wilson’s “Slow Motion Action Painting” at Marx & Zavattero.  Here is his 17” x 17” painting “La Estrella,” photographed by Alanna Yu:

If the painted surfaces appear to be coming at you online, wait till you see them in person.  We first thought the work was painted on layered supports and pieces of angled mirrors, but they are not; the works are simple layers of paint, glass-smooth and softly-graded color across some parts of a piece, rough and bumpy in other sections.  Here is another, “Mixed Greens,” (30” x 72,” my photograph):

This is a light-of-day, blueprint painting. Here is what Wilson says about his process: “I am a painting junkie. I am a slow motion action painter, trusting my gut and my eyes. My paintings are intuitive, built one shape, one color, one line at a time. They are meant to be experienced at a leisurely pace. I am in pursuit of beauty, but well aware that pleasure is the more likely outcome. Pleasure is good too”  (from the gallery website, http://www.marxzav.com/artist.php?id=10).  He says his work is intuitive, which would lend it spontaneity, and perhaps that’s the way it seems to him – but to me, this looks as though no brushstroke could move out of its planned space.

“Pleasure is good.” And with that thought in mind, let’s move to the next group of artists.

Night

I have been reading the new edition of A Farewell to Arms, which includes drafts and several endings Hemingway considered for the novel; here is an excerpt from the novel (that remained): “I know that the night is not the same as the day; that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day because they do not exist…”  (p. 216, Scribner Edition, 2012).

We tell ourselves stories about these “things of the night.”  They go bump. Sometimes we paint or write these “things.”  Rauschenberg wrote that he “always felt a little strange about the fixedness of a painting” and if you look, you might perhaps see what we can call the night-time of his works: the shifts, the shadows, the objects, the sweep of the brush, the partial print of a photograph all conspire to suggest working in the moment, without the help of a blueprint. Here is Rauschenberg’s “Prize,” a lithograph from 1964:

The work is filled with chances taken, with creating in the moment.  Alberto Giacometti said that "When I make my drawings ... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extend, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness." Here is Giacometti’s portrait of Jean Genet:

The portrait “cannot be explained” logically but has its power because of its freedom.  I found three artists whose work is on show in San Francisco whose lines and paints are not coming from the precise light of day, but of this un-fixed night.  Marilyn Levin at Toomey Tourell dazzles with “Morning Offerings” (my photo):

The dripping gold, both banner and airy light -- that gold wouldn’t have its power if not for the layers beneath it and the power of chance, of accident. The way the gold paint has congealed in spots, remained soft and unlined in the round line of “tassels” at the bottom, the way Levin has managed to conjure the feeling of night receding, it’s all gorgeously tumbled together.  The power that stems from these layers does not seem like the result of a clear plan to me.  This power comes from experimentation, taking chances, working with the materials, but letting the hyper-self-critical faculties of day go on vacation for a few hours. This is the gesture or footprint that falls and is not taken back….

Lora Fosberg’s work is at Jack Fischer. She has a series of paintings in gouache, collage and wax on panel called “The Miracle of the Actual.”  These are humorous, ironic, skilled (“she has a fine way with line,” says the gallery owner) and yet the works I want to talk about somewhat different. Fosberg has taken a large, heavy German world atlas from the early twentieth century as her canvas, and sketched in many of the pages (175 drawings, roughly), and these works collectively are called “The Way of the World.” Here is the cover, from the gallery’s website:

This studied collage is in the mode of “careful,” and would fit nicely with the “day” works above. But not so once we page through the book.  There we can see Fosberg’s inventive and knowing hand pulling together threads that, as I see it, she isn’t sure of until they land on the paper. These seem to be freer, looser, drawings that show her hand leading her brain.  One drawing shows logging trucks pulling across an index, sandwiched under “INHALT” and above “Sud Und WestEuropa.”  My favorite is the four Eiffel’d power-towers apparently installed at (the) “Nordpol”; here is that double page, again from the gallery website:

Visit the gallery and leaf through the book with the owner. These are delightful innovations, and make great use of the contrast between the maps and labels and Fossberg’s inked overlays. The Jack Fischer gallery also has a promising show coming up in August by the artist Lauren Dicioccio (see her “cross stitch into found book”: http://www.jackfischergallery.com/artists/lauren_dicioccio/index.htm). (Probably a “day” artist).

One last “night” person; here is Reed Anderson at the Gregory Lind Gallery, “To All a Good Looking Stranger” (66” x 72,” acrylic, block cut and collage on cut paper, taking up most of a wall; this photo is from  http://gregorylindgallery.com/artists/anderson):

And, smaller, but very similar, “Lady Faces,” acrylic on cut paper, 29” x 27,” (photo also from the gallery site):

What I love about these works is that Anderson has given us precision and spontaneity, certainty and the unknown, clean cuts and awkward drips. He has cut the scallop shapes cleanly and created these mapped planes, yet they are against a border of un-carefully-muddied thick paper…. These are good images to end with, because they combine the planning of the first group of painters with considerable devil-may-care, a kind of Hemingway bravado… who else would cut paper and lay in geometric shapes and create something that looks as though it ought to be set carefully on a side-table in a drawing room, and then allow drips and footprints and coffee stains around the perimeter, doilies and warts all in one? Anderson neatly pulls together both categories of day and night.

“First the sun and then the moon, one of them will be around soon…”

Gertrude Stein, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko and Larry Rivers: The "Real" Work

“An audience never does prove to you that you are you”

                                          from “Identity A Poem,” summer 1935, Gertrude Stein

In her wonderful Gertrude Stein Reader, Ulla Dydo offers corrected and annotated Stein texts.  In her introduction to this small “play,” called “Identity A Poem,” Dydo notes that Stein is very tempted by “’audience writing,’” because she is thinking too much about what an audience would want. This was a state of mind that Stein’s new post-Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  life (and American book tour) had given her.  Fame paralyzed Stein’s best writing. She knew that, and was trying to keep herself focused on what she called the “human mind,” which, Dydo explains, “is free of time, memory, identity, and free of the human need for applause” (p. 588).  The line above is a little reminder from Stein to … herself.

We all need these little reminders.  Stein’s audience wanted more of the stories about Matisse and Picasso and life in Paris and … but she wanted to return to writing the works that are still, after all these years, resistant and very, very Modern. And Stein still, even after she became famous, had to pay to publish that work herself. Alice B. Toklas continued to publish (the “resistant” texts) after Stein’s death.

It was heroic, really, all of it.  But Stein had gotten to a place, fairly early on (I think it was with Tender Buttons, myself) where she knew what she wanted to write. 

How does one do that? How does a person discover the way? I think you have to just keep looking until you find it.  You have to accept, along the way, that maybe you never will truly find your own style, the style so obvious and wonderful that you can stay with it forever, the way Stein did, molding and adjusting and not minding (mostly) if the audience can’t hear the rhythms the way you do.

Is the discovery interior? Perhaps we just need solitude, time to ourselves, time to work hard. The painter Agnes Martin’s writings call for this kind of solitude, and they can seem so authoritative.  And, yet, her authoritative voice only arrived after multiple failures. Consider this, an early “New Mexican Mountain Landscape” by Martin:

Martin wrote that “I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought my mountains looked like ant hills.”  (And she was right!).  But she continued to try:  “I saw the plain driving out of New Mexico and I thought the plain had it ….  [Now,] when I draw horizontals/ you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like/ you’re expanding over the plane” (“The Untroubled Mind”).  Martin turned a “plain” into a “plane.” The sheer simplicity of her lines and rectangles overwhelmed the realistic landscapes and won.  She writes “Defeated you will stand at the door of your house to welcome the unknown, putting behind you all that is known” (“On the Perfection Underlying Life”).   She takes a ruler and a pencil and begins -- but only once she has seen the full painting in her mind.  Here is a painting -- with more color than usual – by Martin, called “Stars”:

I think I also read somewhere that Martin tried to destroy all her early work.  But I am glad that she didn’t get every last piece.  We need to know, the rest of us, that she didn’t always know what she was doing.  Martin is not alone in her radical change of style; look at Mark Rothko’s early piece, “Number 26, 1947”:

Now, I really like this painting, actually; it is a perfectly credible AbEx accomplishment.  I wonder what it was that drove Rothko on until he found the layered blocks of color. Here, “Number 14, 1960” (www.sfmoma.org):

I don’t have any of Rothko’s writings that explain this shift. How did he know that the earlier works were not enough?  Was Rothko wanting to distinguish himself from the other AbEx painters? Or was it that he felt something inside of him was not getting expressed?  I know that he was intense, that he felt the work he finally arrived at was not meant to be “abstract” but, instead, tragic, filled with emotion. But I would like to know the ways the work unfolded to its end.  

The third painter whose changed work interests me is Larry Rivers.  Here is “Studio Interior” from 1948:

I think it’s clear why Rivers had to keep working through this style. It seems both Matissean and Van Gogh-esque (if that is even possible).  It has no air. The painting is stilted, false, and begs for a really long, tough conversation with the artist.  Here’s a later work, a “true” Rivers, with AbEx brush strokes and superimposed figures and Pop references, “Matisse and the Model”:

What a relief that must have been.  Maybe Agnes Martin said it best: “I thought that I was big and the work was small. It is not possible to go on that way.”

And maybe that’s what each of them saw: the work was too “small.”  I wonder, you know, I wonder about this searching for the perfect artistic creation.  It’s about the perfect piece of art, the one that you know is it. It’s the same search that we all have for the landscape that seems like “home.”  In the end, it really isn’t about audience, I think; it may be more about Stein’s idea of the “human mind.”  It’s one’s own realizations, restlessness, a longing for the art to seem “real.”  It doesn’t matter if we live in relative solitude, or become part of a wider artistic movement; we just have to be happy with the art we make. What about you? Have you decided on the “forever” work?