"THE PAINTED WORD": "like gold to aery thinness BEAT"

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

          Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

          Like gold to aery thinness beat ….

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

          And makes me end where I begun.

                        From “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne

The Meridian Gallery in San Francisco (see my previous post  -- 2/17/12 -- about their wonderful Patrick Graham exhibition) is presenting a show, now extended through July 14^th, called “The Painted Word,” co-curated by Peter Selz and Sue Kubly.   I will focus here on seven participants:  William Saroyan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Hirschman, Robert Duncan, Henry Miller, and Kenneth Patchen.

Audiences have become used to painters inserting words, phrases or poems in their work, as in Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell’s “Je t’aime (I love you)” below):

But we are not used to thinking about poets attempting, and succeeding at, painted poetry. Only the drawn and hand-printed plates of William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (completed in 

1793) come to mind:

 And then? Most of us cannot imagine any successors to Blake. This show changed all that for me. Poets paint. There was a movement, loosely grouped, endlessly defined, that co-existed with Abstract Expressionism: the Beat generation.  I should say, up front, that not every writer in this show is included in various lists of Beat poets (William Saroyan paints, but does not “Beat” in any list, for example), and that not all poets who came of age in the 1940’s and 1950’s painted their works on canvas (Allen Ginsberg among them).  But they don’t know what they missed -- this show is that compelling.

To better understand these writers and their era, I have been reading The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, by Bill Morgan, recommended to me by the staff of City Lights Bookstore (which, along with the Meridian Gallery, deserves a visit).  Morgan makes a claim up front for the differences among these writers:  “Friendship held these writers together, more than style or ideology” (xvii).  Allen Ginsberg is central to Morgan’s research, the figure around whom, the author says, the Beats moved. Ginsberg was not a painter, but he did set Blake’s poems to his own musical compositions (p.228) And so it seems that almost all of these writers considered working in another medium, or even with another medium. Here is proof; the show includes a poster of a Kenneth Patchen reading, accompanied by André Previn’s jazz, in Oakland (all images from here on are courtesy of The Meridian Gallery):

Breaking boundaries. This show at Meridian pulls together writer/artists working from the mid-1940’s to the 2010’s and makes us SEE the fullness of what the arts are and, specifically, what painting and poetry might BE if we can only see them, combined.

One of the seminal poets whose paintings are represented in this show is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His book, A Coney Island of the Mind, is still in print, and is one of the best known books of poetry from this period, so Ferlinghetti can help introduce us to this way of thinking and feeling. A stanza follows:

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making.

It is critical, that stress on “absurdity /and death.”  Coney Island poems were different from Shakespeare and W.H. Auden; they felt irreverent, immediate, and a little scary.  I found an article, last week, that was first published in The New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952, called “This is the Beat Generation,” by John Clellan Holmes (www.litkicks.com/Texts/This isBeatGen.html).  He writes that there are two main reactions to post-WWII America: people became conformists (what he calls “the young Republicans”) or Beats (what he calls the1950’s “hipsters”).  Holmes writes:

“More than mere weariness, [Beat] implies the feeling of having been

used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and,

ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to a bedrock of

consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up

against the wall of oneself …. [This generation had seen war and, much

as they are unwilling to go back into that void] they have never been

able to keep the world out of their dreams …. They had intimate experience

with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct …. [their experiences]

led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and

Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later …. Their excursions into drugs or

promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment …. How to live

seems to them much more crucial than why ….  The valueless abyss of

modern life is unbearable …. [And yet]  beneath the excess [of the Beats]

and the conformity [of the young Republicans] there is something other

than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest.”

And isn’t that the point, really, that all of us, and all writers and artists, face the question of How to live? That life, and art, involve a kind of realization of the “nakedness of mind,” a “curiosity,” and “the stirrings of a quest”? The unease we sometimes feel, the restlessness and eagerness to find ourselves, and even the fear of what we will find, isn’t that central to our age, even now?

That is why this exhibition is so important, because it connects us, through works we are unlikely to see together ever again, to a larger world of art that helps us see that “abyss” and re-work it into something we can   -- perhaps -- confront through paint and words.  And it is their knowing that the “perhaps” is always there that leads these writers to jump into the paint with such abandon and apparent joy.

The first set of works I would like to mention seem to me to be all about a kind of wild exuberance. Just look at Henry Miller’s “Untitled” (in a corner he has written “1954”):

It is free, and happy; this painting bears no resemblance to the art of the Abstract Expressionists, with its European roots.  This is a fully local, American art, with a couple, a church, a house as if seen in a dream, lush colors, a fully-realized life.  Miller is not someone we think of as a Beat.  And yet there is a connection:  in The Holy Typewriter, Bill Morgan notes that because of the positive outcome of the  1957 censorship trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who had published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems)  Grove Press would later be able to publish Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (p. 129).  And Miller would appear at an international writers’ conference in 1962 in Edinburgh with William Burroughs and Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer, a conference where Burroughs was championed by McCarthy, one of the endorsements that would make him famous (Morgan, p. 195).

William Burrough’s Naked Lunch  (see an excellent short introduction to him here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113610846) would suffer its own censorship trial, but survive, like Howl, to sell and inspire well beyond anything he might have imagined.  Morgan’s book details Burrough’s rough life, from addiction, to murder, to writing influential books with the intense support of his friends.  But Burrough’s visual art can be gestural, luminous, layered, and filled with color, as here in the very large “Piece for City People,” from 1993:

I love these pinks, rusts and purples, and the combination of the sweeping brushstroke and the smaller circles. 

The third in this “exuberant” series of works, one of the striking pieces on the first floor of the show, is “Dipthong,” from 2010, by Jack Hirschman:

We can see drips, a possible figure or animal, writing-not-quite-writing, and kind of brash use of color and shape. There’s a famous story about Hirschman; he sent work to Ernest Hemingway, who replied: "I can't help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere with it."  Hirschman lives in San Francisco, was its poet laureate, and is an activist, poet and painter. Here are a few lines of his from “Who Cares” (printed in Left Curve no.21):

…. he said, speaking of
the future some thirty odd
years ago, of this visual
listening to light
just below the surface of things,
this planetary All in you, constructed
of holocausts and ecstasies, the snail's inch
and the worker's steel, demonstrations and
monotonies, golem and robot, opens to receive
most stumblingly, hungrily, desolately, authentically
sounds from deep within the wilding stillness
and there, when five small human bones tug
at your sleeve of skin, the question-mark
falls away and you know who cares.

There is a continuity here between the poetry and painting, lines in each one that keep moving, verbs that jump, colors that jump, waking you up.

The fourth set of paintings that seems to me to be completed in this bouncy, buoyant mode comes from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  His book of poems, Coney Island,  had helped create his reputation, and Ferlinghetti would help others as he published their work through his City Lights Press. In January 1967, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were all on the stage at the San Francisco Human Be-In, an event billed as A Gathering of Tribes which “marked the start of what became known as “the Summer of Love” (Holy Typewriter, p. 223).  His poems are known for their easy, hip, cool, accessible language, language that offers more each time the reader returns to it. Here is a bit of “4,” from the painterly book Pictures of a Gone World:

 And in the poet’s plangent dream I saw

no Lorelei upon the Rhone

                               nor angels debarked at Marseilles

but couples going nude into the sad water

                                 in the profound lasciviousness of spring

   in an algebra of lyricism

                                 which I am still deciphering

Ferlinghetti’s paintings, shown at Meridian, are sometimes political (“Mother Russia”) or historical (“Freud”) or amusing (“Bagno di seni,” a man in a bathtub filled with breasts) but they are all like a single line of a poem: one thought, selected carefully, then writ or painted large. Here is a center detail of the wall-sized homage to Picasso, "Pablo" from 1991. The painter is surrounded by his creations:

The painter seems to be behind a glass wall, in his own world, unapproachable, but captured, with his women and what seem to be forms from Guernica floating all around him. “Pablo” is painted in primary colors, an interesting choice for a painter who preferred grays and browns.  “If he were here with us,” Ferlinghetti seems to be saying ….

I found, on thinking about the show after I saw it, that a second set of works seemed to present themselves. These are the quieter, more contemplative pieces that gave this post its title, the “gold to aery thinness beat.”  I felt as though these paintings, with their acknowledgement of all that has passed, still found the beauty and the feeling in what remains, just as Donne’s narrator does in his poem :”Valediction.” It is not “A breach, but an expansion.”

“I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend," said Kenneth Patchen (who also read poems to jazz accompaniment and wrote a play with John Cage).  Patchen would be one of the first poets published by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press.  He had attended the University of Wisconsin, and knew T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, yet had to work as a migrant and was confined to bed for his final 13 years, years when he wrote and painted some of his best work.  Patchen played with the poetic tradition:

Sunday, April 8^th (168

With this rose, I thee world. Fashioned in Love, its color the

color of heart’sblood! See, though its leaves do wilt and fall, yet

is it rose; and never any mean or sullied thing. Wonder it!

Meridian has, for sale, a portfolio of delicate silkscreened poems on handmade paper by Patchen; they must be handled with gloves, but they are very beautiful, sometimes funny, always playing with whether colors or words are foremost.  Here is a painting from the show, a kind of “valediction,” called “#160 Untitled,” from the 1960’s:

“Shape-shifting was the essence of his art,” wrote the critic Jonathan Clark (in Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, Kelly’s Cove Press, p. 9. This book is also at Meridian, and gives you a good idea of how linked drawing and poetry were for Patchen).  The painting here shape-shifts on its own.  Roses? Snakes?  Planted fields with gold shot through the air?  Patchen also writes prose; here is a bit of  “A Pasturized Scene” (all crazed spellings are his):

“A little roly poly Giant Sloth chanced to be picking an bouquet of dryish blue skullcaps, when, without any warning whatever, an impetuous Cow dashed from a doorway hung with swinging bags and began at once to make wild threats against his continued safety. Much enamoured as he was by their vague, barny smell and puffy sponge-veined lips, he made in turn ….”

In addition to Shakespearean and Hefnerian sexual innuendoes (which I haven’t quoted here) the Beats had a more than a streak of Edward Lear….

Kenneth Rexroth was also one of the first writers published by City Lights and helped fight for Ferlinghetti’s Howl to be published (Holy Typewriter, pp. 127-8).  Here is the conclusion to the poem “Gic to Har” (from www.poets.org):

I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,

And instantly and clearly the revelation

Of a song of incredible purity and joy,

My first rose-breasted grosbeak,

Facing the low sun, his body Suffused with light.

I was motionless and cold in the hot evening

Until he flew away, and I went on knowing

In my twelfth year one of the great things

Of my life had happened.

Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.

On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.

And I am on the other side of the continent

Ten years in an unfriendly city.

You can see here a lyricism, disrupted, and mourned for. Rexroth’s painting “San Marco” from 1956 has the same mournful, profound beauty:

I stood before this for quite awhile. The layers are really moving.

Along with Patchen and Rexroth, Robert Duncan’s paintings lend themselves to a long, hard, meditative look.  Here is “Flower Design,” from 1950:

It is a Vuillard, a Matisse, but goes all over, right to the edges, as if to say the dance continues… Duncan’s poems have an edge that he does not pull into his paintings.  See these few lines from the prose poem “Structure of Rime XX,” from his Selected Poems:

                  ….You keep the unknown bird hidden in your hands as if to carry sight into

the house. But the sightless ones have opend the windows and listen to the songs outside. Absence, the Mother of Blindness tells them, rimes among the feathers of birds that exist only in sight. The songs you hear fall from their flight light like the shadows stars cast among you.

                  You must learn to lose your heart. Let the beat of your heart go. Missing the beat. And from the care of your folded hands unfold a feeling in the room of an empty space….

And then there is this fabulous work, “Untitled,” which you must imagine as large (and then go and see it):

It is as if Duncan wanted a light, free, and easy touch in the allover paintings that he could not place in his poetry. For him, but not for the other poets, there was a difference between the painted and the written work.

The last of the writer-painters in this “quieter” group is William Saroyan, best known as a playwright, novelist and short-story writer.  One of his works is suspended from the gallery ceiling.  He once told a younger writer "Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell." In this, he is a Beat, although he isn’t mentioned in The Typewriter is Holy.  Saroyan, like Duncan, paints all-over lines (that would later be “discovered’ anew by Brice Marden in his “Cold Mountain” series). Here is Saroyan’s wonderfully-titled “Paris Grass and Other Stuff (June 9, 1961)”:

Grass looks just like that, doesn’t it? Especially in Paris.  And here is my favorite painting by him, called “Orange on Top of Typed Sheet” from 1973:

This seems a fitting piece with which to end this review.  It’s a typescript that has been painted over, and yet we can still read bits of the type, and where we can’t, the artist has transcribed (illegibly!) some of the blotted-out words. Paint, ink, type, paper … it doesn’t get more basic than that. The show is up until July 14. Go and see it for yourself. And let me know what you think!

Revealing the "glimpse" and in the Flow, thanks to eb

A rainy day in Northern California:

So I am thinking … I tend to dream about practical things: continuing a conversation with one of our children, anticipating an afternoon out, remembering to buy coffee.  But once or twice, I dreamed about Picasso and Gertrude Stein.  I wondered (while I was awake!) what language they used to communicate. In my dream, Picasso and I were walking along a Connecticut beach.  “She was so smart,” he said.  I asked him – did they speak together in Spanish? French? English?  “French,” he said.  “We spoke decent French. Enough to talk about art and sex.”

Definitely not a practical, earth-bound dream.  And then I dreamt about Picasso, again.  He was very tall, looming over me, kindly, concerned. And he handed me his guitar.  I suspect this dream came from my reading that when Picasso was young, his painter-professor father had handed him his own brushes, naming him, symbolically, his artistic heir.  So, I used to interpret this dream as evidence that I wanted to be Picasso.  And I don’t know why, but it gave me courage. I wasn’t afraid of it.

That was twenty years ago.  And over that time, my artist-models broadened to include not only Picasso, but Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin and David Hockney.  I was seeing myself as a (third? generation) post-post Abstract Expressionist.  And painting large paintings, 2’ x 4’ or 3’ square, lovely, mine. Each new painting became part of a series, beginning with French-inspired abstract landscapes and ending with my odalisques.

But each time I completed a series of paintings, I was inconsolable, waiting for the next series. And I wasn’t painting enough, I knew that, and I was painting too carefully. Everything had to be perfect, which had not been my feeling twenty-odd years ago when I began to paint, feeling, then, a sense of great freedom and joy.  My inspiration over the years came not only from my Picasso-guitar dream, but from Robert Motherwell: “The problem is to seize the glimpse. The ethic lies in making the glimpse invisible.” So he might be painting about the Spanish Civil War, for example, but there wouldn’t be a soldier, a weapon, or a destroyed town in sight.  Only what he would call “the essence,” which often came down to black and white forms as “protagonists.” So I shifted styles, settings, always seeing that the painting was mine, but always looking for something bigger, greater.

We go to art shows all the time. I saw people painting or installing work that was different for the sake of newness, but not, I thought, any kind of real move forward. And, at the same time, abstract art has become trendy again.  I kept looking for the grand gesture, and got somewhat ahead of myself until I was virtually (artistically) paralyzed. I wrote and painted an artist’s book about the problem that I could not quite articulate.  The story line concerned Isabella, me, but wiser, who was trying to move beyond Motherwell. She begins to listen to a line from Vito Acconci. Here are three pages from the book:

(The arrow in the photograph above is pointing to the nearly hidden Connecticut River).

But then Isabella goes into a kind of funk.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I found myself earlier this year.  I had no ideas.  So I stopped reading all the blogs that discussed seizing and hiding the glimpse, stopped looking at all the trendy re-visions of Mondrian and de Kooning, and started looking for artists who were finding and revealing the glimpse. And successfully bringing that glimpse forward, into the light.  

And I found several people trying to do just this, live in the “glimpse” of each moment, one of them an artist whose work I have come to love. It glows. Her blog is “Be… Dream… Play…”(http://elizabethbunsen.typepad.com/be_dream_play).

Elizabeth Bunsen creates journals, fabric art, paints … there is a very good interview with her at the site “Finally Me” that introduces us to Elizabeth’s life and work: http://www.finallyme.com/2012/01/20/fascinating-women-elizabeth-bunsen .  Here are four of my favorite images from her site (used with permission from eb):

What I love here is the flow: the way the sunlight catches the x’s and o’s and crossed lines in the first golden-black work; the reds and blues and greens where the lines move from color to color seemingly without effort in the second piece;  the facility in the third, with just circles, script and neutrals, that despite its small size creates a wall-size effect;  and the outline of a crow, that somehow reminds me of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” – here is a stanza from that poem:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Elizabeth’s work echoes, like those “innuendoes” in Stevens’s poem.  And it resonates with a kind of joy, the joy of someone who has found her way.  I contacted eb (as she signs herself) and lamented that I could not take one of her workshops in person. I sent eb images from her site which were most striking to me, and she wrote me back with some ways she works, with writing, with coffee stains, with lace, collage, gesso, “I build layers,” eb wrote, and “…. keep going until it feels complete but still airy -- hopefully a bit spacious … I am striving increasingly for quiet simplicity.”  I wrote what I most needed to do –- re-capture that glimpse I once found in my art -- and we set up a web course together.  eb encouraged me to “allow” myself to be “messy” and “play” with different combinations of gesso and words and drawn shapes, and “add what comes by way of impulse and make it your own.” And I send her each assigment and she writes me back with helpful commentaries and new assignments (growing a little more complex each time!).

Really good teachers don’t just teach the techniques they have learned and developed; they teach you how to do your own art.  And eb is such a teacher.

I have shelves filled with journals, but none were like these: works of art.  And I have a room half-filled with big paintings on wood and canvas, but I needed, I thought, to try to work small. It’s one thing to want a viewer to feel surrounded by your work because of its sheer size. It’s quite another to find yourself surrounded by a series of 9” x 12” paintings and drawings on paper.  And I wanted to create work that was portable, closer to the bone, closer to the glimpse.  And I am beginning to get there, thanks to eb.  Here are a few examples of my new work, mostly 9” x 12” but all of it between 5” x 7” and 14” x 17”:

As my teacher and I have discussed, these works have placed me back into the “flow” I had lost, and taught me about the worth and weight of the small, the personal, the intensity of going down into a color and a shape.

In my little book about “Isabella,” I had tried to get there, and I guess I was anticipating the artistic re-birth that, thanks to this class with eb, I have found:

Thank you, eb! And here’s hoping that you have had such an awakening sometime, when you needed it most … let me know!

artMRKT San Francisco: Big Art on Small Canvases

We went to 620 7^th Street at Brannan in San Francisco to see this year’s Contemporary and Modern art fair, artMRKT SF.  There is one more day, Sunday, May 20, 2012, and the fair will be open from noon to 6:00 p.m.  If you are anywhere within walking, Bart-ing or driving distance, please try to go.  This was really a revelation to me.

My husband and I assumed that we would be less than fully welcome, as we are not buying Joan Mitchell, Frank Stella, or the newer artists (one price I heard, for a single work by a living artist, was $32,500).  But everyone -- the guards, the executive chef, the dealers, the gallery assistants -- everyone was entirely at home with the art being shown and was sweet and helpful and REALLY into the art.  They were as happy as we were to see it, and every time they gestured to a painting to explain it, they looked at it as if they were seeing it again for the first time.

I have begun working smaller (more about that will come in a post sometime soon!) so I was particularly interested in finding small work with a big impact…. I should stress that there are many LARGE works as well.

I should begin with art we had already seen in one of the galleries in downtown San Francisco.  The Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, from 49 Geary Street, presented a painting by Kenjilo Nanao, called “Cobalt Night,” from 1964. Here is my photograph:

We remembered this painting from before; it’s a sky, or a landscape, or simply a study in contrasts, but even though it is relatively small (32” x 30”), its intense BLUE surrounds the viewer, as if it were room-sized. 

I sometimes wonder how it would be possible to take the work of someone like Francis Bacon, learn from it, and create new work.  Jack Fischer Gallery (also from 49 Geary Street) showed paintings by Rogelio Manzo. He has, I think, pulled in closer to his subjects, who are, like Bacon’s, posed against plain backgrounds, but Manzo’s faces aren’t exactly distorted or tortured in the same way. There are worlds in these faces, which is really a feat, considering that these works, too, are roughly 18” x 24”-- here are my photos:

The paintings have a transparency to them, as well, as they are made of oil on resin, so there is a kind of sheen.

Three small studies by Tom Wesselman stood out in the booth from the Forum Gallery (730 Fifth Avenue, New York).  The one I found myself drawn to was called “Study for Drop Out,” from 1981:

It is so simple, and it’s maybe 5” x 7” – the small shapes and colors fit together to transform breasts, thighs and hair from a body into layers of carefully-carved rock cliffs.   It’s a new way of seeing the human body.

Modernism, Inc., (685 Market Street in San Francisco) had three works by the architect Le Corbusier, which were all gorgeous.  I had never seen any drawings by him before; these were ink, gouache and collaged newspaper or water, ink and graphite.  The small painting below, “Etude pour la Sculpture,” is from 1940:

It doesn’t seem 70 years old to me.  It seems fresh and new.  The colors hold from across the room.  The dealer here was very sweet, and gave me a Le Corbusier poster because I couldn’t seem to leave the booth.

The one really big painting (that I have to add in here!) that I liked was by John Di Paolo, roughly 48” square, oil and enamel, called “Accelerator,” and it was done in 2012. His gallery is Dolby Chadwick (210 Post Street in SF). Here is my photograph followed by a detail:

This was really two paintings, in a way, a full-color work and then patches of whitish or ivory paint applied thickly over sections; it is a fusion of Gerhard Richter (the thick application in great palette-knife layers) and Willem de Kooning (the evidence of the hand in many, many brushstrokes).  Di Paolo pulls in a lot of light here.

My husband pulled me into the display of works from the Jerald Melberg Gallery (625 South Sharon Amity Road, Charlotte, North Carolina) where two walls were filled with Motherwells, from his work with James Joyce’s Ulysses and from a continuation of that fascination, a series called “The Irish Suite.” Here are three photos I took; these are all small works, maybe about the size of a hand, but, again, it was wonderful to see the simple power here:

My favorite discovery, though, is an artist who shows with the Boltax Gallery (21 North Ferry Road, Shelter Island, New York); his name is Steven Corsano.  He has drawn a series of 10 works on brown paper; again, very simple, very small, but quite a bit of emotion is packed into his small paintings. Some are neutral in color, others have added bright shapes, some have script, others typed words. These three images are from that series, courtesy of the Boltax Gallery:

The gallery has generously offered one of these for sale by auction, to benefit the Verge Center for the Arts (details on the auction online at www.art-MRKT.com).  

Go, if you can, or visit the galleries yourselves ... this is only a small (small!) portion of what you can see!

"The Hole Between Art and Life": Robert Rauschenberg Unpacked

A very young Robert Rauschenberg is perched high on a ladder in front of a cathedral-style arched window, answering questions (undated video, link posted at http://judys-journal.blogspot.com).  We hardly hear the interviewer.  Rauschenberg seems totally relaxed, and really interested in describing his painterly approaches as accurately as possible.

Let’s begin with his combine painting, “Rebus” (from 1955, now at MOMA; photo below by Suzanne DeChillo for The New York Times):

Rauschenberg began with “a ground of newspapers … the funnies …. I had an already-going surface, so there wouldn’t be a beginning to the picture.”  Now this is a very interesting admission.  The blank canvas can be daunting, so I really like the idea of starting, as Rauschenberg says, “an already-going surface.” (Rauschenberg is usually pretty articulate, so the awkward structure of his phrase, “already-going,” seems particularly telling –- it was deeply felt). Robert Motherwell had said that he started paintings by making some kind of painted “gesture” on the canvas, and then, he said, he would have a problem to solve.  Rauschenberg did not identify with Abstract Expressionists like Motherwell, but he says, in this video, that what he did take away from their “passion” was the fact that “they let their brushstrokes show.”  But he also, tellingly, begins with a “gesture.”  For Motherwell it was a sweeping brushstroke, for Rauschenberg it was “the funnies,” but the need for a prompt is the same.  We all need to start somewhere.

After he confirms that “there wouldn’t be a beginning to the picture,” because the funny papers had given him a starting point, he says this very strange thing:  “And so it [would] all just be additive …. It doesn’t matter what’s inside.”  I see what he means about the idea of “additive,” that, given the newspaper ground, he just starts adding more collage or paint or inks or wood.  But then what does he mean by “It doesn’t matter what’s inside”?  “Inside” of what?  He doesn’t mean inside his own mind (because that does matter) or inside his plan for a painting (because there isn’t one).  I think he means that it doesn’t matter what the bottom layer consists of, because it is “inside” the finished combine.  It may peek through, but it is merely the starting point, and it is the accumulation of stages that is important.

Rauschenberg continues, “it’s like when it stops because you’re dealing with an object, what it can make you think of how it could continue.  You begin with the possibilities of the materials and then you let them do what they can do.”  Again, the language is rolling out and he’s not policing it. 

I am going to take some liberties here to try and see what he is really saying.  Rauschenberg certainly never re-presented any objects in his work. He collaged photographs of a Titian nude, or a rocket, or a street scene, but he never described an object on a canvas with his own hand.  What he explains to us, here, is why.  The flow of working “stops” for him when he thinks about “dealing with an object” on its own.  If he were, say, to try and work on a single “object,” the way Manet has with his 1882 painting, “Flowers in a Crystal Vase”:

… it would all stop.  The initial gesture, the idea of adding elements to the combine or painting, the flow of work would all be compromised, because of the necessity of getting the vase and the water and the petals just so.  And so there can’t be a hand-painted, technically-perfect, light-and-shadows-following-the-curve object for him.  When you land on an object, it lands you. 

And I know exactly what he means (assuming this is what he means).  When I was painting my odalisque series, I was so worried about getting the outlines, getting the form, getting the whiteness down right, as here, with “RIVER: Anonymous Odalisque Reclines with Pillows” (3’ x 3’):

And I did love these paintings, but somehow the need to paint them stopped.  I thought of them as exercises in freeing the odalisques, seeing them outside in a new context, a beach, a riverbank.  But somehow they weren’t similarly freeing for me.  And then my son said (not unkindly, but trying to help me see why it wasn’t working for me anymore) “Well, there you are. A woman stuck on wood.”  And then I got it.  That’s exactly right.  The object “stops” the artist in his or her tracks.  And that’s what Rauschenberg is saying. 

We can’t, any of us, anymore, draw a vase filled with flowers, the object re-pictured in its precise entirety on canvas.  We can’t make the flowers out of wax and armatures.  But you can nail a flower to 2 x 4.  Early on in the video, Rauschenberg gives us what may be his most important piece of advice:  “You have to work in the hole between life and art,” he says, because “you can’t make either.” 

"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.

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?