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After
Scylla and Charybidis
I.
Postwar American art is routinely represented in binary terms. Abstract Expressionism,
for example, is divided into the gestural and the geometric, with Jackson Pollock
and Willem de Kooning grouped under the former heading, and Ad Reinhardt and
Barnett Newman grouped under the latter. The problem with these divisions is
that they ignore artists who belong to neither category. Is Bradley Walker Tomlin
a gestural artist or a geometric one? Or has his work been marginalized, as well
as misunderstood, because it is neither or both? What about Forrest Bess, Charles
Seliger, and Myron Stout, for whom gesture and the grid played even less of role
than it did for Tomlin?
Given that there is a persistent tendency to think of Abstract Expressionism
as the source from which all subsequent art of consequence has emerged,
either in direct reaction to, or in some kind of stylistic revival or imaginative
renewal of, its central tropes, one recognizes that certain categories
continue
to influence
our understanding of art. One of these categories is scale, particularly
as Clement Greenberg encoded it with the term “post-easel” painting. Seen against
the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism, and the development of “post easel” painting,
scale is an issue that I think has largely been taken for granted since the mid
1950s. If, for example, we decide to identify art whose scale relies on neither
gestural expansiveness nor the repetition of a grid’s modular units,
what would we discover?
For while gestural painting is regarded as evidence of the heroic self’s
existence, and the grid is seen as an expansive, non-hierarchical field capable
of conveying universalism, mechanical reproduction, self-contained systems of
logic, or an anti-humanist stance, there has been far less attention paid to
work whose scale is not derived from either the breadth of human reach or the
grid’s modular unit, its promise of unlimited repetition and variation.
Here, I would propose that both of these measures are connected to a panoramic
impulse, and thus a sense of landscape. It is within this context that
I asked myself: Are there works whose scale is determined by something
other
than the
grid or gesture? And is that something else evident in the work itself?
I wasn’t interested in a predetermined scale that was oppositional to both
gesture and the grid, but in work whose scale is determined by something intrinsic
to the making of the work, the nature of the support, or the thing that first
attracted the artist’s attention, whether it is as overt as a piece of bread
or as elusive as one’s shadow on a stucco wall. For although Jasper Johns’ lead
relief, Bread, and Catherine Murphy’s painting, My Shadow, On Stucco,
seem to have little in common, the scale of both works was necessitated
by things
and events the artist encountered in the course of everyday life, by a
primary perception.
And yet, even as I recognized that a familiar yet specific experience may have
played a role in the making of their work, I also sensed that something more
than mere curiosity compelled both Johns and Murphy to utilize the means of art
to return to, as well as reconstruct, the initial moment of perception.
Once I took primary perceptions into account, I had to address the possibility
that direct sensations are not always connected to an immediately tangible
reality, that dreams, for example, are also an aspect of one’s perceptions.
Perhaps, and here I am surmising, the artist makes a work of art in order
to discover
what is tangible about a dream. However, once I took dreams as a possible
source, I also had to acknowledge that the relationship between memory
and perception
is neither fixed nor stable. Perhaps the artist used his or her means to
construct not a thing, but the perception of a thing or an event.
It is out of considering these questions that I became interested in registering
different examples of necessity pressing the artist to work in ways that
don’t
rely on either gesture or a grid. My interest is predicated on the belief that
often their use not only predetermines the artist’s approach to the making
of art, but they are this century’s most familiar resolutions to art
making. I wanted to discover what other resolutions artists might have
arrived at,
as well as get a sense of what the sources of those resolutions might be.
All of my questions boiled down to this: What other possibilities have
existed as mediating factors between the artist’s eye and hand? If
they were synonymous with primary perceptions, then what seemed to me to
be the determining
factor
was the human body, not as something that could embrace an immense vista
or chart a seemingly unlimited expanse, but as something contingent, doubtful,
and questioning.
It seems to me the artists are interested in the relationship between perception
and knowledge, between the body that sees and experiences and the mind that thinks
and remembers.
II.
Within philosophical terms, it can be said that gesture privileges the body over
the mind, while the grid privileges the mind over the body. Thus, despite the
visual outcome of the work, each mode is finally hierarchical. However, is it
possible to privilege neither body (seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling)
nor mind (remembering, conceiving, and dreaming) and still make art? Or, recognizing
that the individual is likely to privilege one over the other, is it possible
to make art which explores the changing relationship between the two? And if
there are artists who raise these questions in their work, might it not be useful
to place art within a realm of understanding informed by similar questions, ones
which have haunted western philosophy at least since the time of Plato and Aristotle?
III.
The guiding principle behind this exhibition can be summed up as follows: What
are the mediating factors between mind and body? And can they be made apparent?
Consequently, how does the artist address the relationship between mind and body,
induce the viewer to begin examining the contingent relationship between the
two?
Is Johns’ “bread” a piece of bread or a sculpture or both?
How does one learn what it is?
Is Murphy’s shadow on the wall or in the wall? How does one
determine which plane it occupies, as well as defines?
What is the relationship between reality and its details in Ann Mikolowski’s
paintings, their reconstruction of sight on an incredibly small scale?
What is behind Eve Aschheim’s band of white paint? Is the unseen as important
as what is seen? What is the relationship between seeing and the mind’s
eye?
What does it mean to proceed across the surface without having a final destination
or overall result in mind, as Bruce Conner, Simon Frost, and Mark Tobey seem
to be doing? What is central to artists whose works are the result of minute
accretions?
What is the relationship between writing and memory Elena del Rivero investigates
in her letters, which reside between the legible and illegible? What does it
mean to read that which cannot be read?
What about the relationship between sight and touch that Margrit Lewczuk
and Martin Noël investigate through their very different uses of wood and
paint?
What kind of physical and visual space is suggested by Bill Jensen’s
paintings? What is the relationship between them?
What do sight and touch have in common in Charles Seliger’s paintings?
IV.
Common to all of the artists in this exhibition is the understanding that
sight is bounded, that it exists in relationship to the mind’s eye,
as well as to memory and touch. Thus, I am proposing that one of the recurring
issues
for
these artists is the
problematic relationship between seeing and touching, and thinking and
knowing, and thus between distance and proximity. In their different ways,
each tries
to bring seeing and touching, as well as thinking and knowing, closer together.
The world they are simultaneously investigating and making is right in
front of them. It might be a familiar world, but that doesn’t mean
either they or we know it.
John Yau ©1998
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