Wow - the Beginning

I’ve been looking at art since I was a little kid and drawing since I could hold a pencil. I drew voraciously everyday until 7th grade when a knife accident and the resultant surgeries left my hand in bandages and therapy for several months. Growing up as a kid I remember being taken to museums like the Met, MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum quite a bit. Mummies were a favorite and I drew all kinds of Egyptian motifs and made books about dinosaurs and all the things little boys like.

I was fortunate to see Picasso’s Guernica as a child at MoMA and remember vividly the impression it left upon me with the horse in agony, the mother holding child, the lamp and the Minotaur. But at that age I never gave a thought to becoming an artist, no, an archaeologist was what I wanted to be.

My route to becoming an artist was circuitous. I studied science intensively with an aim to becoming a zoologist specializing in animal behavior but this was the Reagan era with funding for research being dropped and I found myself disillusioned due to the rigid world view that my teachers had and my future prospects.

I dropped out of college and eventually decided to go back to school to study art. At the time I thought it would be a way to get an easy degree (slacker?) however, something funny happened along the way. I found much to my amazement that I could look at paintings, even the most abstract ones that artists made and by the brushwork tell who made them. Within two months of being in the program I absorbed into my memory a large quantity of information that amazed my fellow students.

More importantly I found my calling. As much as I loved science and still do, art gave my life something that hitherto had been missing, a sense of purpose and belonging that was missing and another family, the family of artists and art. In that way, art became a way for me to integrate into the world that I was alienated from and this is the work that led me to it.

In 1985 I was visiting NY after my first semester in art school.

De Kooning
Painting, 1948
Enamel and oil on canvas
42 5/8 by 56 1/8
MoMA Collection



I remember walking into the gallery and seeing this work, which was a sloppy mess (can you tell that I like sloppiness) with the streaks of enamel, the congealed surface in areas, the choc a bloc overlapping of form that hinted at so many possibilities.

As I looked at it a strange feeling overcame me that I had never experienced before. The best way to describe it was like a humming sound, of course there was no hum except in my head and body. I found myself absorbed into this thing, as if looking at it completed a circuit with the power suddenly now ON within me. But what was this me? I realized that the painting and I were one. I needed the painting and the painting needed me, that reality was not me isolated from the world or floating in this gallery amongst strangers, that reality was the moment of my conscious connection to the world and the world to myself. The concept of self magically evaporated as a fiction, self in the western way I had learned to believe in. My sense of self became this living circuit between my body interfacing with the world and my sensory experience of it operating as a looping system, both interfaces propositional and transitional.

It was at that moment that I realized now having been an “art student” for one semester that I had found meaning. The work was whispering and shouting and telling me Yes, Yes, Yes. The only thing that made any sense to do was to commit myself to being an artist, that I had to listen to this voice as it were and that I had to paint, that I had to wrestle with this strange new feeling, that was intoxicating, visceral and earth shaking, as far as I was concerned, it was the most important thing I could do with my life.

Wow Paintings- or Paintings that make (made) me Wonder

Paul Corio in his blog No Hassle At The Castle has an ongoing series called “Paintings I Like” which I always find to be of interest. I enjoy seeing what other artists like as it gives an entrance way into their thinking and appreciation. With my recent blog post about motif, a constant concern of mine, I thought I would do the same. The reason for this is a similar one but also because sometimes stepping back and attempting to write about a work of art forces one to put, best as one can, the ineffable qualities of a work into a more tangible substrate of words, for better or worse.

In my analysis of the works presented I hope to answer to myself why motif is of vital concern and the approach the artist takes in applying paint to canvas (or as we will shortly find some other substance) leads to creating a work that I find important.

The criteria for this and future essays will be that the painting gives me a Wow moment. A moment of excitation that goes back to my post Conceit with the Paul Valéry quote, “A pleasure which sometimes goes so deep…..”

In short, paintings that say “yes”, that puzzle me, that trouble me, that have a place in my memory as to the first time I saw them, that echo in my studio or at least my minds eye and have left a lasting impression on me. So without further ado and hot air…

Sigmar Polke
Negative Value II, Mizar 1982
Oil, pigment of violets and red lead underpainting on canvas
260 by 200 cm, 102.36 by 78.74 inches
Raschdorf Collection
Düsseldorf



I first saw this painting at the Brooklyn Museum at the Sigmar Polke retrospective in 1992. This is part of a triptych and I would include all three but this is the only image I could find online….

Polke’s play between illusionism and reality in this painting is of interest. First there is no recognizable imagery and the color in itself is ambiguous. What gesture that exists, if one could call it that, is not in the traditional painterly terms that one or at least myself thinks about in creating space. The space that exists in this does not make the canvas plane, the proto-typical concern of a Greenbergian formalism in late 20th century the primary focus. In fact this surface plane is of no import, hence the illusionism. Polke has created a spatial infinite not unlike a Pollock classic drip.

What I remember being “Wowed” by was the fact that there was no traditional approach to design, motif, application, formal concerns or painterliness. It was like a giant mess wrought real.

The bands of violet do somewhat affirm the surface plane but are askew and haphazard and overlaying this are moments of drips, stains, blotches of material that physically sit atop the surface and in their presence on the plane as raw materiality are just that, material and real.

What Polke started in this painting for me was another way of thinking of color. Oil paint carries a historical weight and this despite the oil materials operates outside of that realm. I cannot say with certainty but from what I know of Polke’s oeuvre this might be the beginning or the door to his large scale paintings that used resin, varnishes and other materials not traditionally associated with painting. This material fracture forced me at least to rethink materials and color.

The imagery, if one can call it that and Polke certainly mined this particular non-image as image, breaks out of the conventions of abstraction. In this work, Stella doesn’t matter, nor does Johns or De Kooning; this works operates as if it exists in an alternate universe of the late 20th century painting dialectic.

It is weird, hallucinatory (as much of Polke’s work was) and of the fantastic, fantastic in the sense of being a phantasm. Polke showed me a door to getting out of the box of my painterly and artistic concerns, out of the Greenberg knot of formalism I had been steeped in thinking. Polke’s work is not one dimensional but multi-dimensional, his later works using imagery following the rabbit down the hole to another way of thinking, a way of thinking that allows mystery, confusion, dislocation and then affirmation into the world and the viewer. Polke allowed painting to breath again.

Another worthy one caught

As I mentioned earlier today I sometimes miss things and catch up later but here is another gem in my opinion; succinct, clear and important today in ways we have yet to imagine.

From arthistoryunstuffed please find Theodore Adorno and "Negative Dialectics."

Exactly

I do read a host of other artist blogs, not every day and sometimes have to play catch up but this one by Carol Diehl is one I keep track of and rather belatedly caught this particular post Decisions, decisions.

Perhaps I'll add to this with some of my own thoughts on THE THING but Carol's comments on "Now" and "The Thing" were spot on, IMHO.

On Motif

Thanks to Ann for her comment and the mention on Painters Table. I don’t write for such but it is nice to have the recognition, it is much akin to how we or I make art, you or I hope that someone connects to what we are saying and we can have a dialogue or at least a viewer who completes the circuit.

When I mentioned in one of my De Kooning posts about being part of the soup that voice helps. I remember as a younger lad, someone telling Baudelaire, if memory serves me, in a moment of crisis he wondered why should he write. The response was, someone out in the provinces who is all alone reads you and feels no longer alone.

I have a ton of graphic design magazines that I look over and I ran across a comment in an old, 1960ish design thing about an artist. Art is about commune, about the communal. We don’t live in a literal cave but sometimes a metaphorical one and we seek to say something that makes and allows us to connect, connect to a deeper feeling about our lives and our world as humans in a very basic and sometimes banal way. But that banality if I can call it that is very important.

On motif-
One of the things I remember reading many years ago in one of my Richter’s writings and I believe I mentioned it in one of my earlier blog postings was, it isn’t how to paint but what to paint.

A few of my fellows meet once every few months to argue and discuss art, a kind of informal salon. The most recent one involved a heated argument over the Renaissance and the concept of self. I was lucky enough to see the Caravaggio show in London some years ago and I wished I could paint with that kind of fervor and belief in a subject.

We don’t have that subject.

I recently finished Joseph Leo Koerner’s “The Reformation of the Image” and am now finishing Leo Steinberg’s “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion”. These are two very important books in my opinion.

Art and the images they portray or don’t portray are important, in fact are of utmost importance in my opinion.

To make a painting means something. Watching the Richter film was akin to that. I was happy to hear that how he feels about his work, in process, is similar if not exactly like how I feel. Painting is a visual language that is independent but somewhat subscribed to verbal language. I am lucky in that I have a few artists who I can have the most seemingly hermetic conversations one could imagine having about the most arcane minutia one could imagine.

I made a conscious decision given when I was more active in the “art world” to make a kind of gestural abstraction, I still do. This was in the early 90’s. Not one that was related to David Reed or Stephen Ellis but one that was even more raw, disgusting and primeval. Arthur Danto remarked once upon seeing two of my works that they were like the paintings a cave man would make if he made abstract art. He said this in the pejorative and with David Reed by his side.

Mark making means something, the marks that we make add up to something and the image that these marks make are the first and primary form of access. These marks and the image they make are questioned by the viewers as to what is being said, what is being propositioned.

Trying to paint a figure in a perspective space knowing what I know about the history of images and the fact that perspective in itself is a cultural condition is about as relevant as painting a Barnett Newman or Agnes Martin. They are both non-starters.

I can and do appreciate, love and admire those works but the door is closed and I have to figure out as an image maker what is important to me. Not something that answers to the long or recent past, but something that answers to my own anxieties about making images and the necessity despite my usual desires to do so, to find a way that answers to my experience, that at the very least makes it the proposition to a door that I seek. To another way of thinking and seeing, one that maintains the mystery and Wow moment that says, well Wow frankly. One that surprises even me.

As for the great painting…. Well I am a sucker in trying to always make the great painting. For me, at the very least, what is the point?

With that said and trying to maintain a semblance of anonymity, here is one of my more recent works that I am happy with being naked.

By the way it is 6 feet by 5 feet for those who might want to know.

Thoughts on Gerhard Richter Painting

I saw the Gerhard Richter Painting movie the other day. It raised for me some issues. First let me say right off the bat that I think Richter is an important painter. I know some of my friends write him off as too cynical or too conceptual but I find having seen a lot of his paintings over the last 25 years that he is damn good and has to be reckoned with.

One thing I appreciated was how he talked about his process, albeit briefly with the director. How it, the paintings weren’t working and how creating is a private practice. I understand that. Once someone asked me if they could film me in my studio working and I turned them down. It isn’t like it is some sacred thing but it is a naked thing. Richter made a comment about how it was easier to expose oneself in the exhibition versus be raw in front of the camera.

The major thing I walked away from with a new appreciation was how he thinks about his making and the process. In many of these he starts out using old motifs or styles from his 70’s and 80’s abstractions and then slowly subsumes then under a density of the smear. It is the burying and destruction that is partially important but the process gives him the freedom to abandon motif into the act of making. In the process to discover something one could not plan for and the sudden accidental apparition beyond ones conscious control is an exciting moment, an intricate dance between artist and canvas.

He makes one comment early on in the film about how the paintings have their own demands. This I know all too well.

What it has made me struggle with is the concept of motif, my own motif’s that are belaboring me. I think that if I had the time and money it wouldn’t be so hard as I could work in the studio fulltime and not have to desperately seek income. I too, could make work after work with a freedom and abandon to explore and not worry about material costs or rent and where might that lead me? I try to do this anyway but too often the idea of making a “great painting” gets in the way.

Mike Kelley

The first Mike Kelley piece I saw was “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid” in 1989 at the Whitney Biennial. I didn’t like it or understand it. I felt a similar lack of comprehension the first time I came across Frank Stella’s Indian Birds.



Our upbringings could not be more different. I grew up in a family that was supportive of art, going to art museums as a young child with many art books and abstract paintings around the house, not to mention the fact that nearly all of our family friends were European designers and artists who constantly talked about politics, art and culture. Kelley grew up in a far more traditional American setting, one where art was not even an afterthought.

The handcrafted elements of Kelley’s work was completely foreign to me as a device for art making, the elements of kitsch in his work would be kitsch in my childhood home and was not allowed in. So I didn’t understand the blankets and stuffed toys by any stretch. How could this stuff be art?

By the time of Kelley’s mid-career retrospective at the Whitney I started to get it, his retrospective left a profound impression on me and I dragged many friends to see and discuss it. Because our backgrounds were so divergent I never felt the compulsion to use his material means to make my own work but what I got from Kelley was the questioning aspect of what art could be, to ask the difficult questions, to not be afraid and look into ones past or psychology whether culturally or personally and to not be afraid to be garish, bad and unlikable. Kelley’s work forced me to question my tasteful ideas about art and painting, tasteful ideas that were in my way and impeding my own development and that was the best education money cannot buy.

A little over ten years later my work was showcased with Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Bas Jan Ader, Gilbert & George along with Christian Boltanski in a show in Europe. For me at the time it was vindication that what I was doing was important and to be included with people whose work I admired and respected, especially as a relative unknown, gave me a confidence that is in this art world of ours hard to get.

Kelley’s death has left me with the same sadness that I felt when Martin Kippenberger died, the sadness of time passing before it should.