Can an Artist Control Her Viewers’ Perception?: Bobbie Burgers, Flowers, and Two Burdens of Time

Once it leaves the studio, a painting ... acquires a social identity and a life of its own, being priced, bought, sold, loaned, shipped, stored, exhibited, evaluated, restored – an independent object, a possession now belonging to someone else, a commodity which can belong to anyone.  

--James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, p.305

Mark Rothko and his contemporaries wanted their audience to see that abstract paintings were not haphazard daubs of paint; they were about something. Rothko, William Baziotes, David Hare and Robert Motherwell founded a school of art called “The Subjects of the Artist” in 1948.  The school stressed the centrality of the subject, a difficult thing for a mid-twentieth century audience to understand.  Many viewers, at the time, rejected abstract work as merely decorative.  (Even now, pricey furniture catalogues offer abstract prints for sale, together with rugs and sofas). But interior design was not the intent of the New York School

Robert Motherwell, the most articulate of the group that would come to be called the Abstract Expressionists, wrote that

An artist’s ‘art’ is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many

mistakes en route .... Consciousness is not something that the painter’s audience can be

given; it must be gained, as it is by the painter, from experience ....

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Without ethical consciousness, the audience is only sensual, one of aesthetes.

                                    (from “The Painter and the Audience,”  The Collected Writings of

Robert Motherwell, p. 108)

Reception: Ethical or Aesthete?

With this in mind, we arrive at the work of Bobbie Burgers. Her exhibition, “Suspended Between Sweetness and Sorrow,” has been at the Caldwell-Snyder Gallery in St. Helena over the month of April (there was some discussion of continuing the show for two more weeks) and Burgers will be showing in Stockholm, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver this year.

One audience for her work fits the description of Motherwell’s rejected aesthete. The paintings are lush, luscious, all over Pinterest and on designers’ and diarists’ blogs where delighted people repeat ... how pretty it is.  And it is so beautiful. Here is “Dismantling #3,” a diptych in acrylic on canvas, for a total size of 60” x 96,” from my iPhone (better resolution photographs may be coming from the gallery):

And here is a closer view of the joined canvases:

Full bloom and big enough (both in actual size and in conception) to surround the viewer with flowers at their peak. Burgers’ best work is like this, I think: big enough to, as she says, feel “intimate,” and in one range of colors so that the mind stays firmly in, say, whites, blues and purples and can really take them in. (“Fewer elements,” Picasso told Francois Gilot, ‘create s feeling of strength in reserve” – Life with Picasso).  Derek Stefan, the very kind and knowledgeable gallery attendant, says he always feels as if the flowers “move.”  There is background action here... but more on that in a minute. Stay in aesthete mode.

Consider an artist whose work is also beautiful: Mark Rothko. When we look at his oversized paintings, particularly when we are in a room filled with them, we may feel the softly delineating colors calm us, as here in “Untitled, 1950-2 (from the Tate Modern):

I have noticed that people tend to tiptoe quietly around his work. The rooms are dimly lit and very quiet. And yet we would, if we had been trying to guess the artist’s intention, be wrong. Mark Rothko said his paintings were “skins that are shed and hung on a wall” (Breslin’s biography, p. 306) and spoke of the “tension” in his work (p. 281) and its exposure of his “despair” (p. 286). Breslin’s biography delves sensitively and affectionately into Rothko’s depression and its relevance to his art. Skin in the form of paint.

The painter Robert Motherwell mentioned something that dovetails rather well here: “a remark of John Dewey’s ... sticks in my mind: We tend to think that we end with our skins, but actually we are always interpenetrating with reality .... That is where so many biographers fail. They think that if the ... [painter] is miserable that accounts for their miserable expression. It can be the exact opposite. In a depressed state an artist may produce the most radiant things...” (interview with David Hayman, July 1988, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio, pp. 286-7).  And Rothko did just that. But we don’t see those shimmering colors as skin that has been shed – at least not until we hear that’s what the painter thought. (And then – is that too much information?)

Writers are not immune, either. In a 1988 interview, John Cleese said “If I pick up a book by Bertrand Russell, I find that he is dealing with insights and ideas that have got enormous comic potential, far more than if I start flipping through S. J. Perelman. Because, in a sense, I suppose as you get older you get more interested in the ‘Big Jokes.’ “ Probably not Russell’s plan.  But humans tend to find comedy and beauty where we can, the painter or writer’s intentions be damned.

Now to the second kind of art, the kind that attracts the second, more serious kind of audience. When an artist’s work is considered too beautiful, art critics begin to call the work unworthy.  And sometimes art can simply be greeting-card pretty. But the art that I love, that stays with me, offers a deeper layer of emotion or meaning. It’s something more than just a pretty face.  It is what that New York School wanted us to see: there is a subject, something for the audience to feel. And whether or not a viewer stops in front of a painting and responds to that subject? That is something that no artist can control. Either the depth is there or it’s not, and the difference... well, it’s pretty subjective. I have written about artist’s statements at length here, where artists try to help the viewer see that “something is created there all by itself,” beyond what is, at first, visible. (Here is one such entry:

http://artistinanaframe.blogspot.com/2011/11/artists-statement-viii-something-is.html and there are others in the series. What can we say about our work that will resonate with everyone?

This artist, Bobbie Burgers, states that “my florals have moved from being portraits of flowers, to being portraits of time” (Foster White Gallery site, Seattle, 2013 show). I am not quite sure that I agree.  There have been many works of art about time, and my favorite is a four-minute video, “Still Life,” by Sam Taylor-Wood.  She filmed a basket of fresh fruit and then, using time-lapse photography, films its decays. Here are two stills from the process:

(the film can and should be seen at the Exploratorium Museum on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, on loan from the Fisher Collection, but is currently available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJQYSPFo7hk ). Film is wonderful, no? But ... it is more difficult to trap the passing of time in two dimensions

So let’s look at Burgers’ work more closely.  Here is “Dismantling 1” (again, iPhone):

Unbelievably FAT yellows, concentrated in the upper left corner, flowing down.  The flowers could not possibly feel more abundant, more filled with color and the blossoms are caught at the precise moment when ... well, you know.  But this doesn’t seem to me about time, except that she catches these flowers in full phase... because, in that sense, capturing a moment, all art is about time. No, I think it is something else.  Let’s find out what that something else might be

Motherwell has said that, to meet his standards (and I realize we don’t have to do that, but it is a good set of standards, so let’s go with it for the moment), a painting must reveal what he calls the painter’s “consciousness,” Part of the truth of a painting is not just the artist’s own expressed consciousness, but what she has absorbed, knowingly or not, over a lifetime.

The principle influence that I see is Joan Mitchell. Here is “Sunflower III, 1969,” (112 ½” x 78 ½”):

In an interview, Mitchell becomes positively inarticulate when asked about her public reception:

In France, I’m an ‘American gestural painter’ which is, the lyric on top of it, very pejorative ... and here [in the States] I’m a ‘Frenchie’  ‘cause I have color and the decorative ... ‘ooh, ooh.’  (You can’t win).  And on top of it all I’m a girl, a woman, a female....     (from Joan Mitchell, a film by Marion Cajori)

Joan Mitchell comes into Burgers’ work  in many forms: in that "decorative" first impression, the sheer size and reach of the paintings, in the lines etched here and there in the background, in the long, clear drips.  That same clustering of blossoms into an upper corner of the canvas, this top-heavy lush world, immerses the viewer... something about the weight of those colors as they spill off the top of the painting surfaces seems to bring the viewer into the world more fully than, say, a canvas completely filled with color. The spaces leave room for us to come in.

Burgers doesn’t concern herself with the fields or vases, the roots, stems, leaves or bowls of water that might su[port these flowers. It is color, drip, and the occasional clearly-defined blossom that defines the work. And I guess it is the drips, the background scratches, the sheer emotional weight of the pieces in a full-on exhibition that makes me feel that yes, this is a work about the artist’s “consciousness,” not about time, but about feeling. Again, with the low-resolution shot, but I think you can still see what I mean. The emotion is in the details. here, first, a detail of “Contradictory Emotions #2” and then a detail of “Sense of an Ending,”:

Think, too, of the titles. Again, it’s a question of the artist signaling her intention. It isn’t about time. It’s about that life experience, poured into the background behind the fullness of the flower.

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?

Criteria for Abstract Art: Image vs. Text, Part IV

Can we discuss abstract art without resorting to text? Is there a way to see a painting without being blinded by the artist’s biography or the work’s appraised (monetary) value? Are we able to make a fair judgment, based only on the image before us, and come to a determination about a painting’s artistic worth? 

We need to avoid some rather familiar descriptive terms; I use them, too, words like “energy” or “intrigue” or “artistic intention” or “finesse.”  But these are not objective terms, are they? One person’s “energy” is another’s “confused mess.” How can we escape the emotional and often divisive nature of subjective terminology?

There aren’t too many truths that we could all agree upon, but here are some terms that might help us avoid our tendency to become arbitrary. Let’s think about: color, line, surface texture, form(s), composition, process and method, space, symmetry (presence or absence), and, when relevant, historical context or influence (Cubism, for example, or Op Art). 

Now take the two paintings I presented you with, here, on February 26^th, and we can work with each of the two, using these terms to try and investigate the work on its own terms.

First,

 Color: prevalent, from bright yellows in the background to red, green and blue overlays. There is a softly painted, not-quite-“squared” grid painted in black, echoed by thin marker lines. Some forms have black edges. The final layer seems to be drips of color, mostly deep blues and pure white. Color is a big part of this painting.

Line: broad, soft strokes for a grid, and smaller grids in thin marker lines echo the bigger grid from center to lower right. The dripping paint forms a line with its color. Two forms upper right are outlined in black marker.  There is a kind of script or faux signature at lower left.  Except for the broad grid, line seems less important than color here.

Surface texture:  the paint seems in places to have soaked into the canvas, and there is a bit of bare canvas at bottom right.  The paint layers are thin, with the only build-up coming from a collaged typed square near the center and the poured or dripped paint lines, which appear to have been the final layer.

Forms: At top right, the grid comes over the bottom yellow layer; some thin grids follow in lower right.  There is one white triangle center left, but all the other forms (except two that are outlined, top right) are organic, rounded, with no clear outline and no apparent reference to known objects.  Or: there may be one green feather coming up from the lower left. The splatters create forms, too.  The meeting of the grid and these organic forms seems to provide most of the focus for the painting.

Composition:  this category overlaps with Forms, above, but the composition also seems to be centered in the painting’s upper two-thirds. The lower part of the painting is spare, nearly a blank canvas.  This forces the eye upwards to the yellow colored ground.

Process and Method: (see Surface Texture, above) Actual brushstrokes are not obvious, except for the soft grid. Soaking and dripping seem to dominate otherwise.

Space: (see Composition, above) Despite the heavy paint application, there is enough blank canvas and enough yellow to offer plenty of room here for the eye to move.

Symmetry (or its absence):  Generally not; the composition is off-center, the bulk of the painting moves towards the top of the work.

Historical Context or Influence: Mixed: this is a post-Pollock, post-Frankenthaler work, but seems to be in a world of its own.

Now, let’s look at the second painting:

Color:  Subtle browns and grays, with shadings of black and whites; outlining and over-lining in blacks and whites.  Color does not seem to be a major preoccupation here.

Line: Line seems dominant in this work.  Almost all of the lines curve, with only two short vertical straight lines in the right half, and many of the lines are outlines, either for painted figures or for figures not otherwise made visible.

Surface Texture: Uniform, with no apparent paint build-up or collage.

Forms: Organic, mostly, with forms that look like test tubes or glasses and bottles, and there is one possible breast and one possible bottom.  The forms overlap, and seem more in this painting than in the first to refer to real objects, but those objects have been rendered unclear and ambiguous.

Composition:  All-over. There is no concentration of images in one spot rather than another; the paint and lines are applied equally across the space. Attention is paid here (more than in the first painting) to edges; the forms here begin to fade all around the edges of the work.

Process and method: As with the first painting, the brushstrokes are not obvious here. The lines dominate.  It would appear that the colors of grays and browns were set down first, perhaps from a sketch, and then the black and white lines were applied.

Space: The forms as outlined overlap and leave very little un-painted, un-accounted for space.  The painting fills the canvas almost completely.

Symmetry:  The artist seems to be working with symmetrical forms; some of the curves echo one another or invert one another. There is almost an upper-lower, left-right symmetry, but it is just off, which means it calls attention to itself as a composition.

Historical Context or Influences:  This is a more important category for this painting than for the first. The work seems very tied to the colors and overlapping shapes of Cubism, and may also refer to the dream-like forms of Surrealism.

Overall, while these two paintings are very different, it is not possible to raise one over the other, for me, simply by concentrating on the paintings themselves.  One does not seem, even after study, to be “better than” the other. If we were to stand before the two in a gallery, questions of scale and application of paint and true color, none of which we can refer to here, might sway the balance.  But I think it is a very interesting question. I would like to know what you think. The first painting is mine, from the mid-1990’s, and the second is an early (1945) Mark Rothko, titled “The Rites of Lilith,” and it is now owned by his daughter. 

Image vs. Text. Let me know.

What's It All About, Alfie?: On Abstract Art and the Question of Meaning

Here are two paintings from the year 1824. The first is a "Seascape Study with Rain Clouds" by Constable:

This certainly could be an abstract work by a contemporary artist, hanging somewhere in Chelsea. The second is by Caspar David Friedrich, "The Sea of Ice":

Again, if I had not yet seen this, and someone told me that this painting was in a gallery in London, just completed by a young German artist, I would be impressed.  Both of these works are actually likely to have been studies: of light, of form, of the layering of paint. They contribute to each artist's practice, and yet neither is really characteristic of the major works of these men.  I find them moving. And yet, I have friends who belittle abstract art, who, when they are faced with a work by one of our contemporaries that seems as "abstract" as these, laugh, or think of them as "studies" for something more significant, as works with no meaning, as mere decoration. I have seen a sweet little old man point his umbrella towards the center of a huge De Kooning and say "There, there's the lighthouse. And the rock is just over here."


I remember an interview with Robert Motherwell on PBS, where he said, at one point, very slowly and forcefully, that "If the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting."  And we look at a Motherwell, "Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV" from 1953-4, measuring 80 x 100" (think here of scale):

When you have been in a roomful of Motherwells,  it is impossible to deny their "violence" and "humanity." They are not decorative. They are meant to evoke feeling. I knew someone who worked for Motherwell once, who, fresh out of art school and trying to become a famous painter, asked his new teacher a series of questions. And Motherwell, a very articulate and learned person (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia), fed up, said, finally "Don't talk to me about theory.  *#%$  theory. Go home and astound me."  Abstract art may provoke theory, but it isn't made out of it.

It can be easy to walk right past a painting and not even try to take it in: it's too hard, it's too late in the day, it seems a silly exercise, people say. And yet, and yet. Take Mark Rothko.  Here is a work of his from 1954, called "Homage to Matisse" (who had just died that year):

Matisse is right there. Rothko said that "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing."  He meant, he said, to express "tragedy, ecstasy, doom ..." through his work.  Rothko's work does not reproduce well. It must be seen. He created it through transluscent layering, and, when you stand in front of one, you can see the colors peeking through, the way memories appear, unbidden. The paintings reverberate in real life. There is a DVD called "Rothko's Rooms" which is a pretty powerful introduction to his complexities as a person and to the aims of his art.  Kirk Varnedoe said that "Rothko may make us think anew about the evening sky, but having once thought about the evening sky, we think about Rothko differently."

Josef Albers created a series of works over years, working through the way that colors could show us the way to see.  Art and science were one, for him, and he worked through endless combinations of colors, sometimes with only faintly observable changes from one to the next, all in the same shapes, squares nested inside of squares.  Below is "Study for Homage to the Square" from 1970:

 

Even in digital reproduction, we can see something happening here.  As I thought through my list of abstract painters, I had no luck finding anyone who painted in the void. I can't think of anyone who didn't have recourse to feeling or meaning as the paintings developed. Not anyone. Albers may have said it best: "Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it."

And so I leave you with one last view, of a Northern California winter sky:

in which we think again about decorative vs. art-about-something

I am an abstract painter. I do not usually paint to "re-present" existing people or objects. I believe that works of art, or works in a series, are not imitations, or tricks, and should not simply stand in for another (worthier) object, the painting of the golden bowl a simple study in skill. The painting is, itself, the thing.

My husband and I, who generally agree on things artistic, have these discussions. I have always thought that art should be about "something," that there must be a subject matter; most of my painting heroes argue along these same lines: Motherwell created the Spanish Civil War series, and Agnes Martin, the "perfect space."  Painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell have been too easily dismissed because critics said that their work was not about anything, that it was too lyrical, too beautiful.... A shudder dismisses the work and then passes through all of us. We all approach the studio with an idea, I believe.

But Charley says that art can be, simply, beautiful, gestural, with no "three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon in Taos," even in an abstract vein, about it.  Rothko, he says, may have believed that certain of his works were violent, but it would be difficult to convince viewers -- who see the colors floating on the canvas -- to find that same intended violence. Art is about the way the piece itself meets its viewer, ultimately. And Charley has some pretty impressive artists who would appear to be on his side; isn't Pollock's work largely "about" the painting itself? Picasso was loathe to release the work from his studio because then it was out of his control. And Bruce Nauman wrote somewhere that "whatever I was doing in the studio must be art." (That's WHATEVER, equalling art).

So, today, when I was reading in Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, by Julian Bell (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2010) I saw this amazing photograph of two paired screens by Ogata Korin, called "Red and White Plum Trees," from about 1712. Bell writes that the artist, here, "touches on ancient themes of seasonal transience and complementary opposites" but also "cancels them out flamboyantly." The work's "dazzling flatness seems to declare that painting can simply be decorative, simply a demonstration of exquisite taste and perfect poise without further significance. At least, such was the rhetoric that gathered around its painter. Korin himself was a dashing bourgeois dilettante...." (265). Here is a photo of the work:

So I would say, the painter is delineating the tree branches perfectly (what Bell refers to as demonstrating "seasonal opulence"), yet he then gives us a pattern, in what seems to be an anticipation of Klimt, to show us the flow of the river, then he allows an entirely abstracted gold-leaf ground to stand ... itself signifying "nothing." So we have the full movement from representation to abstraction, from intentional rule and role-playing to throwing over all the rules.

Charley and I would agree, I suspect, that the gold here is the stunner. The complete expanse of (Nauman's) "whatever" takes the breath away. But... there's still that about/not about thing....

So then Bell talks about Dong Qichang, from China. Dong had argued that a painter named Ni Zan, who painted, he said, "merely to sketch the exceptional exhilaration in my breast" (139) could be seen as perfectly right in his (oh-so-loosely-representational) idealism, which, Bell writes, meant that Ni Zan, in Dong's theory, "kept a judicious, culturally well-informed distance from the crude imprint of the immediately visible" (266).  I love that sentence of Bell's.  Wow. The "crude imprint of the the immediately visible." It's pretty tempting to leap right into that, but I can't, really.

I think it takes a lot for an artist to to get the viewer to the "immediately visible." And I think it means that yes, that "visible" stuff can be pretty, or violent, or "nothing." But there still, for me, is a subject matter, even if that subject matter is "the crude imprint," the subject matter being, itself, the subject. "How to paint this" is, to me, a huge subject to articulate on canvas. But we will talk more....