“A Sequentiality of Improbable Possibles”: Liam Ó Broin’s Inferno Suite

Homer wrote The Odyssey in Greek. Virgil wrote the Aeneid in Latin.  Dante Alighieri wrote about the death of Ulysses in the Inferno, part of his Divine Comedy, written in the Italian dialect of Florence. James Joyce wrote Ulysses in … dozens of English languages.  The reverberations, even in this broad list, are astonishing. They fall together like the clicking of great dominoes. All of these writers are tampering with the lives of heroes and gods, making decisions, in effect, instead of gods, and playing with our collective imagination in the process. Reaching for too much, perhaps? “Man’s reach must not exceed his grasp,” wrote Robert Browning; Joyce will later come along to say that he simply wrote “a sequentiality of improbable possibles” (Finnegan’s Wake).

It is impossible to escape Joyce while walking through Dublin: Dawson Street, Davy Byrne’s, a statue, a plaque, a bookstore’s display window, a busker. 

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned

                  --Introvibo ad altare Dei.

This is the beginning of Ulysses, where Joyce has Mulligan call out to Stephen Daedalus:

--Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit….

--The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.

So Joyce brings together priests, fathers, ancient Greek myth, religious orders, bodies and morning ablutions, and the “mild morning air” surrounding the tower…. spilling over onto just… two pages.

It’s a beautiful kind of Modernist pulling-together, an equating of all things, to say that anything we notice becomes, then, notice-able.  Samuel Beckett had worked for Joyce as a secretary. He told the interviewer James Knowlson that “I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away.” Two Irish writers, finding and clinging to extremes.

Joycean excess may stem, at least in part, not only from the Modernist air the author inhaled (Pound, Stein, Eliot…) but from his reading: everything, including the Inferno (in the original Italian, in all likelihood).  Dante’s journey with Virgil into Hell allows the poet to create sublime cataracts and deep sorrows, to expose sins and “fitting” punishment (think of the two lovers, Paolo and Francesca, attached through eternity: “there is no greater sorrow/ than thinking back upon a happy time in misery”) and, perhaps most importantly, re-imaginings, as in a new version of the death of Ulysses. Instead of returning home to Ithaca, Ulysses and a small band of his followers continue on their voyage, leaving behind families and lovers, travelling

…. where Hercules ordained

The boundaries not be overstepped by man.

[They sail on, then ] ….  from afar

Appeared a mountain dim, loftiest methought

Of all I ever beheld. Joy seized us straight;

But soon to mourning changed. From the new land

A whirlwind sprung …. so fate decreed

And over us the booming billow closed.  (Canto XXVI)

Just in sight of an earthly paradise – drowned, down to the bottom of a funnel of water, instead of arriving at the peak of a mountain.

This is one of the 34 images that have inspired the artist Liam Ó Broin. Here is his Canto XXVI print, “The death of Ulysses” (my photograph):

Many of the other lithographs offer stark black and white contrasts, so this print is unusual for its colors. It struck me as stunningly beautiful because the lithograph seems to offer us both the mountain and the whirlpool in a few layered strokes, the greens and blues here simultaneously offering hope and despair.  

Ó Broin’s series of lithographs respond to each canto in Dante’s Inferno, part of a projected series on the full Divine Comedy.  These lithographs (singly, or in a full limited-edition book) take the inclusive nature of the works of Dante and Joyce and pare that abundance down to a spare, astonishingly stark and beautiful scene, worthy of Beckett (whose Waiting for Godot begins with the stage setting: “A country road. A tree. Evening”).

Ó Broin has selected quotations from each canto, or has interpreted for himself the essence of the vision. Here are two sample titles: from Canto X, “Heretics are people with whom we simply disagree,” and from Canto XXX, “Truth – hidden by lies, is even deeper, beneath silence.”  The artist says that this series is “not intended to be an illustrative chronology,” but it certainly feels, to me, to be a thorough, and profound, re-interpretation, pulling from the original a moment that “shimmers with ambiguity” or another that “is scathing in its condemnation” or another that is, simply, “deeply personal” to the artist (all quotes are from the artist, from the brochure called “Inferno, A Journey”). Ó Broin notes that the concerns of the 14^th-century Dante “people’s aspirations, hopes, concerns, the battle against injustice, poverty, ill fortune, and an evolving process of morality” and “the human pursuit of peace, contentment, love and fellowship” resonate with us now and “that continuity makes Inferno so real” (brochure).  Dr. Riann Coulter notes that this is really a “collaboration” between Dante and Ó Broin. The images from each canto that Ó Broin has created pull Dante’s concerns into sharp focus, nowhere more so than in the final image, from Canto XXXIV, of Lucifer (my photograph):

This portrait comes from Dante’s difficult description of the three faces of Lucifer:

….words would fail to tell thee of my state….

                                    I did spy

Upon his head three faces….

At every mouth his teeth a sinner clamped [Judas, Cassius and Brutus]….

[and slowly, Virgil and Dante exit until]

Thus issuing we again beheld the stars.

The three-part print here seems both ghastly and gorgeous; in its very ambiguity it hints that, in seeing the vicious fate spelled out for Lucifer, Dante will be able to climb back to tell the story -- the story he has imagined for all of us – so that we can see in these three faces the stars beyond.

If you are anywhere near the Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin, see these works, and talk with Ian Bewick at the gallery. He has much to say about the work.... See these prints if you can.....They are lovely "improbable possibles" that will stay with you.

Repeatedly Painting Closed Worlds, or Inventing Open Worlds: What is Abstract Art For?

“An original author always invents an original world …. There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius: he must create it himself and then create the consequences.”

 --Vladimir Nabokov on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

Nabokov’s observation about one of Austen’s more controversial novels applies to artists as well.  No artist, no author, wishes to produce a work that has already been written or painted; “make it new.” I want to talk for a bit about what this means for abstract artists. For the purposes of playing with “original worlds,” I am going to pare down all the possibilities inherent in abstract art for a moment. I will divide the practice of creating abstract art into a choice of painting either closed or open worlds. Bear with me.

Representational paintings present the viewer with a battle, or a nymph and satyr, or encourage us to linger over the breakfast coffee cups or the delicate pinks of a rose, but the abstract artist is not re-presenting. Abstracts offer forms and colors to us … for the first time. This is the attraction of what I am calling the closed method: these painters draw geometric shapes, straight lines and repeated verticals and horizontals, not coffee cups, not armor, and not even their contours, in order to propose a different space to their audience.  A new space.  Josef Albers said that he felt that “abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I prefer to see with closed eyes.”  Here is an Albers painting, “Homage to the Square: Terra Caliente”:

 There is no organic shape or line here, no delicate shading, and we could even call into question one of the most basic ideas of painting, figure against ground. While there are no straight lines in nature, Gertrude Stein (reputedly) said, Albers has given us several.  The squares reverberate; their colors move. Albers painted many “Homage to the Square” works, always adjusting the color and the squared forms. The titles alone call into question what we think we know; a homage is to …a person, isn’t it?  Agnes Martin said, in “The Untroubled Mind,” in her Writings, that

Then I drew all those rectangles

All the people were like those rectangles

they are just like grass

That’s the way to freedom ….

These paintings are about freedom from the cares of this world

from wordliness ….

Art re-stimulates inspirations and awakens sensibilities

that’s the function of art  (p. 39)

We are to be re-moved, waked up, re-imagined by this art.  Here is a Martin, from 1961, called “The Islands”:

 Paintings by Agnes Martin do not reproduce well in photographs. It isn’t possible, here, to see the careful pencil lines or to trace the slow movement of a brush from the beginning of a line to its end.  Seen in person, close, paintings by Martin are not only about different space, but about time, the time it takes to paint them, the time it takes to take them in. Because the works are so plain, so repetitive, so apparently “easy,” a roomful of Martins is very calming. Agnes Martin had begun her painting life in New York, in the full glare of the Abstract Expressionists. Early works of hers, now mostly destroyed, show her finding her way, but very much in the wake of others. Martin even stopped painting for a long period of time, until she arrived at this new way of painting, a way of working that is hers alone (just as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons belong only to her, or e.e. cummings’ treatment of the poetic line will never, it seems likely, find an heir).  

It isn’t the “shock of the new,” but the “seduction of the new” that pulls painters in. More recently, the Damien Hirst spot paintings -- completed largely by his studio assistants -- are introduced by Hirst this way: “When I first painted them it was this brand new thing and I felt immortal in a way. The time was right. We were fucking dancing on the tables, changing the rules, nothing could stop us …. The spot paintings were definitely conceptual art. There’s an optimism to them which is amazing” (interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, January 10, 2012, www.galleristny.com). Here is a Hirst, “DL-P Chlorophenylalanine Methyl Ester,” 1998:

New … like the dots of Georges Seurat, these dots push and pull.  Hirst’s assistants had been making color and placement choices, “anything not to make a decision,” Hirst says (in the interview with Haden-Guest) but he did eventually take those rights back and planned the works, for maximum impact, one assumes.

The reason that I am describing these works by Albers, Martin and Hirst as “closed” is that there is no more to be done.  Every square is complete and framed, every line is finished, every dot is painted.  There isn’t any erasure, or softening of effect. It’s all there, planned, complete, conceptually perfect.  And there’s a good deal to be said for that -- I like Martin’s work, in particular – but there is a small problem with working this way now.

Rosalind Krauss wrote, in The Originality of the Avant-Gard and Other Modernist Myths, that “Perhaps it is because of this sense of a beginning, a fresh start, a ground zero, that artist after artist has taken up the grid as the medium within which to work, always taking it up as though he were just discovering it as though the origin he has found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction … were his origin, and his finding it an act of originality. [And yet] …. The modernist grid is, like the Rodin casts, logically multiple: a system of reproductions without an original” (pp. 160, 162).  So these works are not … new.

What of the other category I have mentioned, the “open” painting? Here, I won’t give you several examples, just one, of a really powerful artist from Ireland: Patrick Graham.  (His solo show is now in San Francisco, at the Meridian Gallery, through April 14, 2012, and then moves to American University in Washington D.C. and will be shown in the fall at the Saint Louis University campus).  We saw the paintings and drawings (installed in the three stories of a beautiful Victorian mansion near Union Square) last week.

I should mention that Graham does -- often -- employ at least one straight line in his work. As a child, “I had a sense of being rooted” in Monaghanstown Bog in County Westmeath, Graham says. “I would look up at the sky with the larks hanging there, and then back down to earth in a great circular sweep …. I used to strip off and lie on the bog, feeling a sensual belonging to it. That meeting of earth and sky -- that horizon appears in all my paintings, locking everything together” (catalogue, p. 15).  Here is my husband’s favorite work from the show, “Deposition: Study 7,” from 2010 (all images are courtesy of The Meridian Gallery, San Francisco):

 There isn’t a straight line here, exactly, just the lining-up of the three central forms and the stretched-out figure of a man creating the sense of line among them.  The space is mostly white, with delicate tracings of pencilled-in forms (a pyramid or roof, something that looks like a table, lines and some scratches that are indeterminate) and phrases, bits of meaning, in two places on the painted board.  In an essay focusing on Graham’s iconography, Jarrett Earnest says that he sees these “tiny graphite specks” as “creating an ominous sense of pestilence or a dense invisible presence, like a ghost” (catalogue, p. 72).  Well, that “ominous sense” is certainly possible, although I did not see this work as prefiguring death or despair. There may be a ghostly presence, as I was certain that I saw a painting underneath, something painted out; this “Deposition” leaves you wondering.  The title is ambiguous, as well; is someone giving evidence (for himself? or against someone?) or is something simply being laid down … to rest? To think?

One of the characteristics of an “open” painting like this is its indeterminacy; interpretations will vary.  Samuel Beckett, in speaking of his novel How It Is,

said that meaning is “a rumour transmissible ad infinitum in either direction.”  And rumour, like meaning, can be rather unreliable -- particularly when it might run in two directions at once.  Earnest has reviewed statements by Graham, and notes that “Graham stresses that all his work is strategically unfinished, that it is left open.  Openness -- to receive, to listen -- is an unfixed state of transition” (catalogue p. 56).  The openness means that the works seem to be “in transit.” They have not arrived at their final stages; we get the feeling that nothing is pre-determined. Unlike the paintings we looked at above, based on the grid, where movement comes from color placement, which tricks the eye, so that a dot of a certain color seems to leap past another, here, the movement must be contemplative. The movement, the sustained interest, must be supplied by the viewer.

“Open” also means imperfect. Graham has stated that he found himself, at a young age, accomplished, “a self-conscious possessor of gifts that focused a kind of attention on me that I simply didn’t know how to deal with” (catalogue, p.80).  He needed to begin again in a world of sturdy shapes; like Matisse, Graham isn’t delicate. His bodies are flattened and not entirely in the frame. Look at  “The Artist, the Woman,” from 1983-4, a painting that is 72 ½ “ square:

The dedication is to David Bomberg, the British painter whose early work was geometric, Cubist, Futurist, but whose time in World War I trenches changed his work completely to expressionist figures and landscapes.   The figures dominate only the upper half of the painting with torso and head and blue veils or clouds; the lower half, here, is the more “open” half.  Why this dedication, here? Why the energetic brushstrokes and bubbles? Is this earth or water? The interesting thing here is that we don’t need to know.  We can simply see the arrested face of the woman, the cancelled-out face of the artist (looking rather like a Francis Bacon).  The horizontal and vertical lines here seem to be holding the figures in, so they don’t simply fly off into space.  Intriguing, and totally open to interpretation.

My favorite of all the works on show is the painting (the title says drawing, but it seems … more than that implies) here, called “The Lark In the Morning: Reworked Drawing, 1994,” and it is 31 7/8 x 44 1/8 inches. This is one of two works with the same title, but this is the one I really love:

 The rose-colored (male? female?) nude on the right seems to be in a calm, quiet space, where the nude (male? female?) on the left is in the midst of scribbling, re-painting, lines, marks (including two x’s) and cliffs or smokestacks… a riot of disparate images.  Or perhaps it is the person on the right who is bereft, and the one on the left in the midst of happy energy. What’s wonderful about this kind of art-making is that it’s still open, like a landscape.

Patrick Graham said: “the landscape has influenced my work right up to the present, particularly the low horizon; and that great vista where you can encounter space, and figures in it, in all kinds of ways….  Silences. No conversations. A looking-in, rather than a lived experience. That ‘looking-in on things’ has stayed with me: a self-contained art” (catalogue p. 44). What Graham has done is to create his own “original world” and the “consequences,” for us, are that we have a new -- truly new – landscape to lose ourselves in.  And we are very grateful.

A Few (Playful!) Ideas on Perspective and the Fourth Wall

 "Me to play" (Hamm, in Samuel Beckett's Endgame)

In the first chapter of her book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, Rosalind Krauss mentions perspective. She is working on detaching perspective’s crossed wires (the ones we all remember from Art History blackboards) from her reader’s impressions of the grid, which she wants to discuss at much greater length. It may not be fully polite to pull these few brief phrases on perspective away from their context for greater attention, but I do believe that Rosalind Krauss will understand. I am playing with what she says here, starting with her entirely authoritative view on the subject....

A young model and painter recently remarked that she was collecting books about perspective. She doesn’t mention why. I believe that we do not think about the ways we “assume” perspective, any more than we think about the fourth wall between us and actors on the stage -- until a dramatist calls our attention to it. Modernism and post-modernism and post-post were the arts meant to wake us up -- but we still see those lines in our dreams.

Here is the core of what Krauss writes: for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, “the perspective lattice is inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of its organization …. Perspective was … the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawing from it.  Perspective was the demonstration of the way reality and its representation could be mapped onto one another, the way the painted image and its real-world referent did in fact relate to one another – the first being a form of knowledge about the second …” (10). 

The “lattice” of perspective is “inscribed on” a picture as the “armature of its organization,” Krauss says. She is perfectly right; the “lattice” is not integral to the scene the artist wishes to portray. Lovely word, lattice, but, architecturally, it is meant to separate the man or woman at the window from all that he or she surveys, as with these women in John Frederick Lewis's "Indoor Gossip, Cairo" from 1873:

 And, as Krauss notes, perspectival lines must be “inscribed” by the artist’s hand, imposed from without; the landscape is branded, really, re-organized, so that we can readily trace the object back from our marked spot as viewer to the vanishing point.  

We have been taught to see. We imagine the horizon line, and not only when we look at a painted landscape.  As we go on vacation, and gaze at sunsets, we sketch in the diagonal lines ourselves, and see the two rows of trees, or the grapevines, or the jetty, stretching to that imaginary horizon, each tree or rock diminishing, one after the other, in precise rhythm.  As we do this bit of artwork up against real horizons, we must not move, ourselves, as that would completely spoil the lines.

Krauss says that perspective was  [and many would say, still is] “the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawing from it.”  And yet, think of that lattice: a means of withdrawal; again, John Frederick Lewis, in "The Siesta," from 1876:

(See... isn't this fun?) We must remain motionless, on its other side, just as we must remain motionless in our seats and imagine that “wall” between us and the very-contemporary human onstage playing the role of the king, the one written in the 16^th century.  And yet, even Shakespeare wrote in asides, the little winks to the audience that broke the wall.  Aren’t we able, then, to move from our rooted spot in the landscape, as Constable did when he packed up his brushes and went in to lunch, after painting "Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames -- Morning After a Stormy Night," in 1829:

Wouldn’t movement be more scientific?

Krauss ends the remarks on perspective by saying that “reality and its representation” were, for these early artists, “mapped onto one another,” since they saw perspective as a “form of knowledge” about their “real-world referent” (10).  It was, for a long time, a required way of knowing. But it should not carry such pure authority now. David Hockney has said that the problem with perspective is that “it stops time. …. Space has become frozen, petrified” (from True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Wechsler, published in paper by The University of California Press, p. 66).  And that same critic who interviewed Hockney, Lawrence Wechsler, quotes an earlier artist, Jacques Riviere, who said in 1912 that “perspective is the sign of an instant, of the instant when a certain man is as a certain point …. But in reality, we can change position: a step to the right, a step to the left, completes our vision” (Wechsler, 197). 

So, wouldn’t it be fun to really think about perspective; if we do use it, as painters, let’s play with it, let’s break it down, the way a Shakespearean actor breaks down that final wall, with an aside to our audiences…. As Hamm would say, "Me to play."