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 grids modular
units, what would we discover?
For while gestural painting
is regarded as evidence of the heroic selfs
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 grids 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 wasnt 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 artists attention, whether it is
as overt as a piece of bread or as elusive as ones
shadow on a stucco wall. For although Jasper Johns lead
relief, Bread, and Catherine Murphys 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
ones 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 dont
rely on either gesture or a grid. My interest is predicated
on the belief that often their use not only predetermines
the artists approach to the making
of art, but they are this centurys 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
artists 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 Murphys 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 Mikolowskis
paintings, their reconstruction of sight on an incredibly
small scale?
What is behind Eve Aschheims band of white paint? Is
the unseen as important as what is seen? What is the relationship
between seeing and the minds
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 Jensens
paintings? What is the relationship between them?
What do sight and touch have in common in Charles Seligers 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 minds 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 doesnt mean
either they or we know it.
John Yau ©1998
|