"Seven Days in the Art World," and One Day at the Hess Art Museum

There is no date.  Some people say it was the 1860’s.  It could have started in the Renaissance.  Perhaps it began in Venice, or maybe later, in Paris or New York.

Art got loose.  It found a hole in the fence.  And it wouldn’t -- anymore -- be judged by how gently the artist draped painted lace falling over a hand, or the shadow thrown past a vase, or those columns receding in perfect order, diminishing to a horizon line.

And as everybody began to chase after Art, and put it back in some kind of order, two things happened.  A bad thing, but also a couple of good things.

The bad thing is that auction houses, blue-chip galleries, and art fairs are now the arbiters of artistic “worth.”  Art is only valuable when someone buys it. And what makes people pay more for one painting rather than another?  The artist’s text: the lengthy bio, the MFA, the awards, the “buzz.”  The written lists and hype now trump the actual image (see posts here from January 20, 25, 31 and February 8, 2012). 

So, continuing with that bad thing that happened: I just read Seven Days in the Art World.  It isn’t new -- Sarah Thornton’s research was done in 2004-2007 -- but she was allowed into all the back rooms the rest of us can’t find. And I suspect that not very much has changed since the book was published. Here are a few examples of what Thornton found.  As she sits in on a critique at CalArts, Thornton says the students say that using words like “creative,” “beautiful,” “sublime,” and “masterpiece” are all “embarrassing,” so these terms are not allowed.  No “value judgments,” they say (65).  But if not here, where?

Thronton interviews the finalists for the Turner Prize of 2006, a very small world, with overlapping text. One artist, Tomma Abts, who eventually won the prize, tells Thornton during the process that “I have been part of the London art world for eleven years …. There are 4 artists nominated [for this prize] every year. I always know at least one.”  Both Abts and another of the four finalists, Phil Collins [not the drummer], were awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award, both showed at the Istanbul Biennial and both showed at the Wong Gallery in New York.  The Turner Prize is such a major award that betting shops give odds on the winner.  And yet, it seems the choices, year after year, don’t range very far afield.  Thornton also writes a chapter on her visit to the offices of Artforum, where she talks to the editors and to one of their contributors, Tom McDonough, an Associate professor of Art History at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  McDonough says that critics “reward work not because they think it is the most important work being made … but because it’s a little corner that they can own” (170).  It’s not even really necessary to comment on this, is it?

Thornton watches the preparation for a 2004 auction at Christie’s and then sits in on the auction.  The interviews in her auction-house chapter seem more moderated,  the stated opinions more circumspect, but, still, the manipulation of the art market becomes clear.  One of the people Thornton talks to, Josh Baer, says that “without auctions, the art world wouldn’t have the financial value it has.  They give the illusion of liquidity …. If people thought they couldn’t resell … many wouldn’t buy a thing” (26-7).  The sales placed in an order according to what will sell and raise the level of excitement, as a staff member confirms: “we lay out a sale commercially. If we laid it out art-historically -- chronologically or thematically – it would probably bomb.  The first ten lots have to go well …. At around Lot Twelve or Thirteen, we’d better be entering a serious price point” (27).   The auction seems more and more orchestrated, the crowd worked in hushed tones.  An art consultant says that “People want to become part of the lifestyle …. To collect contemporary art is to buy a ticket into a club of passionate people who meet in extraordinary places, look at art together, and go to parties. It is extremely appealing” (34).  Thornton ends the chapter with this discouraging observation: “Even if the people here tonight were initially lured into the auction room by a love of art, they find themselves participating in a spectacle where the dollar value of the work has virtually slaughtered its other meanings” (39).

So that’s the bad thing.  So, now that art cannot be judged by chiaroscuro, or perspective, or established models of how to paint velvet, or a chalice, or the perfectly-proportioned body, is there a good thing that comes of this freedom?

A good thing: freedom.  Robert Motherwell said that the Abstract Expressionist artists thought that, since no-one cared what they did, they could do -- anything. 

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? How do you not care, as an artist, that the art world is so insane, and that no-one cares what you do?  

“Work engenders work,” Georgia O’Keeffe said, so that’s one good thing an artist can do: work, work in freedom.  Work, and not care how many or how few people see it or buy it. You don’t want your art to be like the art in the student critique, where no-one can say that it is “beautiful.”  You don’t want a critic to seize upon your work and award you a prize just because she has backed you into ”her” corner.  You don’t want your art to be a piece of a box-tour “lifestyle,” just another liquid possession.  Just keep working.  Maybe learn to play the accordion or knit or box, too.  

Another good thing that can come of this wide-open field is the ability to see art in open studio weekends, in cafés, in galleries, and … wineries.  We went to Napa and, up a residential and then increasingly twisty and fragrant road, we found the Hess Winery and Museum.  And they are not kidding.  It is a small, perfect museum.

We were directed up a stairway, carefully tucked with lots of glass and steel inside a massive stone building.  The art on display, we were told, is about 20% of Hess’s collection; he has other museums in South Africa and Argentina and another is planned for Australia.  We stopped along some drawings and paintings by John Connell, an artist born in 1940 who lives in Maine. The painting below, “For Yr Little Autumnals,” is from 1987. It isn’t actually in the gallery, but it is typical of the painted work by Connell:

Connell blends words, sometimes the title of the piece, and roughly-inked and painted figures or abstract shapes, on paper. The paintings and drawings were filled with an apparently spontaneous energy. My favorite title was “Pumpkin with Breath Knocked Out.”  Connell says the idea of “Wabi” is “my aesthetics, sensibility and inclination” and he quotes Jen No Rikyu: “Beauty concealed under a wretched surface” (Hess Art Collection catalogue, p. 82).  Alongside some of the drawings were small statues of Buddhas, like these, taking on the character of sandcastles:

And then there are more works lining the landing and we turn into the first room and there are huge paintings by Theodoros Stamos and Robert Motherwell, and then, continuing on, Frank Stella, Per Kirkeby, Anselm Kiefer.  We are already overwhelmed.  Among the Motherwells is one I had never seen. It looks like a combination of a Rothko and a Mondrian, with a purple stripe left, red blocks of color upper and lower right, and grey and black stripes in between.  Totally uncharacteristic of Motherwell … but then, next to it, as if for reassurance, is an “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 160.”  Then we came to a room filled with 3 types of works by Andy Goldsworthy: “Surface Tension” from 1993, “Earth and Snow” from 1995, and “Rock Pools” from 2000.  I don’t expect to see Goldsworthy indoors.  This is one of the best installations I have ever seen, by anybody, anywhere. Here is a photograph by Paul Kirchner from the catalogue (spread over 2 pages):

The rocks on the floor are real rocks that have been placed in a kiln and transformed.  The hanging at the end of the room is “horse chestnut leaf stalks connected with hawthorn thorns” and it’s an amazing, delicate structure.  But then we arrive at a wall of Francis Bacon paintings: a triptych, a “Study of Pope Innocent X (1965)” and maybe the most perfect Bacon ever,  “Study for a Man Talking” from 1981:

The forms behind the figure are crisp, the shredded receipts at the man’s feet sufficiently mysterious, the suit blocked loosely in, with all the wear and tear of life etched into it.  The face is coming forward and receding, moving and blurred, flushed and graying.  And the catalogue gives us a single quote from bacon: “One wants to do this thing of just walking along the edge of the precipice.”  And the painting does just that.

There is also, by the way, a roomful of Rauschenbergs, really fine, and some work by George Baselitz.  There was another discovery for us, Frank Gertsch, a Swiss artist, both figurative and abstract, wood cuts and a piece made with “mineral pigment with Damar varnish used as a binder.”

I tried to find out how it was that Donald Hess found all these works of art, because each work represents its maker accurately and each one astonishes.  I never did find it.  Hess is to be congratulated for throwing the doors open. 

Art got loose. And these two good things -- making art, no matter what, and seeing art, no matter where – can, if we let them, more than balance out the bad things in the current art-as-commodity world.

Francis Bacon said, "You know in my case, all painting ... is an accident."

"I foresee it and and yet I rarely carry it out as I foresee it .... It becomes a selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve"  (quoted in Theories of Modern Art, Chipp & Selz, p. 621).  True! I once saw a film of Robert Motherwell and an assistant readying a plate for a run through the press.  Motherwell dripped a few last bits of paint onto the plate, looked at it, and had the assistant rub off some  -- but not all -- of the excess. It's all about the choices we make as artists and viewers.

One summer in Paris, in 1994,  we saw Joan Mitchell's paintings at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. It struck me, first, that they were so large that she would need a ladder. Or several. And, second, that she had made no allowance for a mistake. Each brushstroke was accounted for.  Here is a close-up of the kind of work I mean, "Two Pianos," from 1980, which is, in full, 110 x 142":

We once lived near a talented and inventive glassblower named Gary Zack.  One of his "mistakes," he thought, was a wide shallow bowl, rimmed with colors, with a small abstract glass form clinging from the center to the edge; it was not perfect because, as he was finishing it, it came out of symmetry and pulled slightly to one side. He rejected it; we loved it, and brought it home, and kept it through two moves, but the movers broke it during the third move.  The accident was beautiful to us.

So, as I am re-working paintings, I find I make mistakes that I wipe away, and then I make a few that I keep. Here is one of the keepers, a tiny detail, but it adds a fluid line in a rigid spot:

Artist's Statement IX: double vision and the Bowerbird

So, the second paragraph of my working draft (of my artist's statement) reads like this :

"My work may be strongest when it contains contradictions.  Van Gogh spoke about this: “it is as though one dreamed twice, in two registers … the simplest image is doubled: it is itself and something other than itself.”  I paint here and there, foreground and background. The work is still, but it often refers to movement. I have long described myself as an abstract landscape painter, but I am beginning to draw and paint faint odalisques in those shimmering landscapes.  I paint the world I know against the world I imagine."

I run everything I write by my husband, and he read this and said "can you elaborate?"

Okay, so here is a totally different run at the question:

"The 'Odalisque Series' that I am working on now begins with a base abstract work.  For two or three paintings, I began with a work that I had painted months before and re-painted over parts of the piece, or scraped down portions of paint or collage, diminishing but not erasing the original painting.  Other works have begun with a painting that was painted specifically as a base. The nudes --- taken from well-known works by Ingres, Van Gogh or Matisse, for example, or sketched from life -- are then outlined and painted over the base, lightly, usually in a pale white (or peach or blue).  Then the two parts of the work need to be reconciled, and that takes the most concentration, really.  I have found that I like the contradictions in this work: the figure and ground, the color and line, the figure and the abstract, the studio model (here) and a landscape foreign to her (there).  Van Gogh wrote that an interesting challenge for an artist might be: "if, while painting a cottage, he dreams of a nest. It is as though one dreamed twice, in two registers ... the simplest image is doubled: it is itself and something other than itself."  I am following his suggestion and taking it a step further by revealing both images in paint.  I am also taking Francis Bacon's idea of the moving figure, twisted and heavily colored, against a plain ground, and reversing it, so that the image is plain and the ground shimmers and moves.  This is, I think, a true measure of the way we see the world. I paint the world I know against the world I imagine, and this duality has a real power, I believe."

Better?

And, now, for the artist's statement of the Bowerbird. The male Bowerbird of New Guinea and Australia builds a bower to attract a mate; these are not little round nests, but elaborate structures, sometimes two parallel walls, sometimes curved branches that create a roof. The Bowerbird may "paint" the bower with mud, and he distributes shells, flowers, leaves, and any colored found objects around it. Some bowerbirds can also mimic sounds, like the speech of humans or the sounds of a waterfall.

Here is a photograph of a Satin Bowerbird's bower, from Barry Hatton:

And here is another photo, this from Matt Webster, of a Greater Bowerbird bower:

You should also take a look at a video by Josep del Hoyo, from October 2010, filmed in Lamington National Park in Queensland, Australia:

http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/satin-bowerbird-ptilonorhynchus-violaceus/close-adult-male-painting-bower-using-beak-applying-

Artist's Statement IV: "...into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, clichéd, etc.)..."

There are two kinds of artist's statements; the first presents the artist's general approach, developed over time (Cézanne's claim that "I don't think of anything when I paint") and then the artist's specific preoccupations of the moment (Constable's "I have done a good deal of skying -- for I am determined to conquer all difficulties").  At the moment, I am considering the specifics as I work on my odalisques.  And, in the main, I have a foreground/background (also known as figure/ground) question.

Richard Foreman gives me the place to start. He says he writes plays that he would like to see onstage, and he also has said that he does not want very much "story" in his work, because people fall asleep: "What this amounts to is a DECISION to view non-beautiful material in such a way that what was foreground is now background .... and the desired beauty is then projected, as the creative act, into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, clichéd, etc. ..."  So we reverse figure and ground. And we do not fall asleep!

Here is the simplest foregrounded subject, a detail from "The Blue Crab," by Ferdinand Bauer, from approximately 1810:

We have nothing else to look at but the subject, the figure; the crab is laid out upon a totally white ground. It is a specimen. The background is irrelevant; in fact, there is nothing there, which is too bad, because if we replaced the crab in its context, the seashore's sands and rocks and seaweeds would be beautiful to see.

Francis Bacon believes in the figure and the foreground, and in pushing away the background almost entirely. Against the most passive and pale -- or un-identifiably bland -- backgrounds, his figures twist and turn, the faces are contorted, pained, unstable.  Look at this center panel from the triptych "Three Portraits," 1973, apparently a self-portrait:

Bacon worked from photographs that had sometimes already been mangled; the faces, and the bodies, were the thing for him, the only thing. I think he believed that the viewer might stand long enough before the painting to put the sitter's face back into some recognizable form, and that, in the process, we might see our confrontation with these distortions as the point.  He was a "foreground" man.

But, I really love Foreman's idea. Why can't we switch the foreground and background, and bring the viewer's gaze to a new place? I think that emotion can not always be seen in a person's face or demeanor, but instead we can sense it in the surrounding air, the sidewalks, the windowsill, the forest ... wherever the setting might be.  The figure -- the blue crab, or Bacon's self-portrait -- may not be the thing we should concentrate on.  Let's imagine, with Foreman, that it's the context that is important.

So here is an unlikely co-conspirator: Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).  Friedrich's figures are inside the sublime. In this painting, called "The Wanderer above the Mists," the man, were we to cut him out and place him in the library of a club of his time in London, would be totally at home; he is impeccably dressed and unremarkable in himself. The man, the "figure" does not matter as much as the "ground," his context here; the painter has focused on the ice, the mist, the rocks, the mountains ... the "background" is here the foreground, the real subject:

The mountains in the distance are impossibly far and forbidding, as is the abyss before our lone figure.  The abyss matters. This is, of course, the forbidding Romantic idea of the Sublime, before which the poets and painters stood in awe. (See Wordsworth's "The Prelude" for more!). The place, the indifferent powerful world of Nature, the "ground," was the point, and not the "figure" standing before it.

Artists and their audiences "see" better when they pick up the figure's context and use it. I think that blank, open figures in a complicated space might allow us to project and imagine, particularly if we are looking at odalisques. The pale odalisque that Gerome painted in "The Moorish Bath" (my November 11 post) is in a context that matters... can we think our way inside?

So, "to illustrate my last remark," here is a detail of my painting "The River," a nude in a new context:

The very air is charged....

Francis Bacon painted the body electric. The works are a gorgeous study in figure (charged) ground (not) relations.... I have discussed Bacon's work before (April 9, July 2, July 7, all 2011, here).  I love his work. But I do believe that there is room for a dialogue of sorts, an annotation, if you will.  Bodies do not always look as if they are undergoing great emotional stress. Sometimes, it is the context that has changed utterly.

We change our whereabouts, our contexts, our landscapes, all the time. Sometimes the place we find ourselves is familiar, or it may be the same place but without people we knew, or it may be the same place, but the stand of trees has been felled.  Or, we may be somewhere completely new to us -- "I have been someplace I never would go to," sings Joan Armatrading, in "Everybody Gotta Know This Feeling." So the air is different --- not always us. We carry our "person" with us. But the air? Not the same.

So I have been painting these odalisques -- my definition of the word is pretty loose, as I include Titian's "Venus" and then Picasso's Demoiselles and Lucian Freud's Leigh Bowery work among them.  Sometimes, as with Delacroix, or Matisse, the models are from North Africa. But in the case of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the models are Parisian, or situated in Rome (when he won the Prix), and for Freud, the model is a Londoner. All these nudes that I work from are painted, very decidedly, indoors.  I pull each form out of its "frame" (the harem, Freud's city studio with skylight, Picasso's triangular blue -- but very much an indoor -- "sky").  I supply the body with a new place, out-of-doors,  "someplace ... [s/he] never would go to." I want to see what the body looks like in an imagined new world.  The body is on the canvas, pretty much in the form of the original painting, so both here, and ... there, in a clearing, or in a working port with container ships arriving, or.... anywhere but in a Paris or London salon.  Here is my latest, based on Titian's "Venus of Urbino":

Francis Bacon said "I want a very ordered image,

but I want it to come about by chance."

Sometimes, I throw paint at one canvas and splatter a photograph on the wall as well. Or, I come home from a Matisse show and paint over everything in the studio with his blue. The photograph is still on the wall, rather intensified by its new blues and reds; the Matissean blues had themselves to be painted away.

But that sunlight and shadow that I photographed two days ago? It was a lucky accident. Something was missing from that painting -- I was tending towards too much middle ground -- that came back into it when the light and shade hit, so I have painted it in. The painting had reached this point:

But now is here:

Belonging ... IS ... figure/ground

We lived in France for several summers and a sabbatical of eight months in various rented houses and, lastly, for nearly 2 years in this house in Normandy:

And through it all, we had always felt ... French.  But that wasn't right, exactly, and we didn't quite fit.  We sold the house and the car and some of the furniture and came back to the U.S., this time to the West Coast, where we had family but no real history, yet.  And, while we all know it isn't any use not moving, moving, all by itself, is interesting in a peculiar sort of way and it can make you question ... everything. California? Connecticut or New York?  where, exactly, does a person belong? I have talked about the idea of belonging here, before (March 26th and 28th, for example) but I find now that I have an artistic response...

I wrote about Francis Bacon and figure/ground on May 19 ... I do think that the idea may have been to paint all the anguish into the figures on canvas ... but I do think the ground needs its fair share of that tortured linear movement. Sometimes it is the air around the figure that moves. And it came to me in a flash that, really, figure/ground, anguish and stillness, rest and flux: these are all terms about belonging.  Really ... think about it.

And so the series of paintings that I am starting is not so much about juxtaposition ... but belonging, and figure/ground. A ground sliced by a figure, or competing for attention with the figure.  I played with one of these, the picture posted June 28th, today:

figure and ground, ground and figure...Francis Bacon reversed

When we look at a Francis Bacon painting, such as "Screaming Pope" (the affectionate term for his "Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" from 1953, among others, one of which is in the art collection at the Vatican), we see a figure moving, in vertical lines of repetitions of itself, in agony or ecstasy or a frenzied combination of both. Bacon seemed to see the person in his paintings, the figure, as the only element requiring movement, considerable movement, generally more approaching an agony than an ecstasy. He kept and annotated and ripped and tore and re-configured photographs that could inspire his work. The source photographs that survived him are barely-there, as in this photograph of his then-lover, George Dyer:

 This is from the book Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, a show curated at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin by Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison. It becomes a very different thing than a photograph ... it is already tormented, "changed utterly," as Yeats wrote.  Bacon's portraits, diptychs, triptychs all reflect this concern to show the body as moved from both within and without, as in this (unfinished?) Untitled (Self-Portrait) of Bacon from 1991-1992, from the same book:

Look at the lines. There is a frantic, circular repetition to this sketch. The face is pretty intact, but the feeling that this piece conjures up, at least for me, is changing, busy, unsettled, anxious... Bacon chooses to let the figure move against a flat ground ... not just here, but most of the time.

So I ask myself, what if it were the other way around? What if the figure were still, and the ground moving? Because, as we move through the air, the air appears to move... we think of ourselves as intact. The struggles tend to remain inside. Bacon exposes them. But what if the air responded, instead? What if the surroundings were the sopurce of energy for the painting, and what was "background" comes to the "foreground"? Take the comparison of Rubens and Picasso from a few posts back (April 26) and block out the figures from each... what survives here?

 

In the Rubens, the lovely view out of the curtained window. it still seems to calm and distant, too much a reminder of its former status as... filler? In the Picasso, a great deal stays with us. Look at the energy of his "ground" as it becomes figural, here... look at the lovely slices of blue, nearly vibrating... The whited-out Demoiselles are pretty angular and bold, but they fight, now, for space and for the sense of movement offered by those slices of sky and curtain. He could have gone abstract. It was always an option.