[This essay was written in April of 2011 for a forthcoming exhibition of Witvliet’s work in Holland. Exhibition details to be added as available. See Witvliet’s Website for images and text.]

I am painting a soldier in a desert, nameless. All what is identified is his nationality and his location (1.)

Growing up in the Eastern part of Gelderland, in Holland, Jeroen Witvliet used to look out over the fields along the Dutch-German border, a Kieferesque flatland riddled with little dips and incidents subdued by a general grey, weaponry half-buried (the wings and fuselage of a doomed Spitfire and Focke-Wulf in Paul Nash’s wartime Totes Meer) like the spontaneous gestures of action painters fallen to earth.

Anonymity and threat as indistinguishable forces that nonetheless compose a continuum analogous to ‘nature’ (whatever that is) are at the centre of Witvliet’s work. This is not a conventional nature, nor really a romantic wasteland awaiting restoration and renewal. If anything, it resembles the post-Eastern-Bloc terrain of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, which Slavoj Zizek characterizes as, “wild vegetation overgrowing abandoned factories, concrete tunnels and railroads full of stagnant water,” suggesting that Tarkovsky’s wilderness is shadow to Western materialism, ‘the capitalist drive at rest:’

[…] nature and civilization overlap, but through a common decay – civilization in decay is again in the process of being reclaimed (not by idealized harmonious nature but) by Nature in its decomposition. The ultimate Tarkovskian landscape is that of humid nature, a river or pool close to some forest, full of the debris of human artefacts (old concrete blocks or slabs of rusting metal). The ultimate irony is that it was a director from the Communist East who displayed the greatest sensitivity to this obverse of the drive to produce and consume (2.)

Witvliet, who has adopted the West Coast of Canada as his home for over a decade, lives close by the rocky beaches of Swartz Bay, where he often observes the mingling of this decay firsthand in the form of tidal refuse: half-devoured wooden pallets, Styrofoam packing sheets and frayed and oxidized steel cable, strangely out of scale and in its utter abandonment (thrust higher than thought possible onto the shore by winter storms) seems not merely discarded but dispossessed.

His studio is a modest wood-framed outbuilding smelling strongly of linseed oil. It suggests an atmosphere segregated and preserved from the landscape around it, but coloured that same coastal grey, prone to those same ineluctable cycles or surges; a centre of gravity where things stir, albeit more slowly, at the behest of sustained concentration. The studio imposes its own duration and variability. It is a kind of history-making, if we think of history not as a traceable chain of cause and effect, but as a waiting game whose outcome is ever the accrual of substance; a hazardous mass negotiable only through the imposition of structure. Structure in painting is a business of testing: compositional models must be applied in a way that is blindly experiential. Looking at the dully gleaming, porous but obdurate surface of a gridded grey painting that fills one wall I think of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus on the beach: “if you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”

The images are first of all subject to a general lay-out. Addressing if and if so at what stage in the editing process, the general lay-out of a page in the newspaper or on the canvas becomes superior to its content

The trial and error of composing a single painting is a weighing of the internalized histories of painting in general. I recently thought of Witvliet’s pictures when I read Jeff Wall’s explanation of his 1978 photographic work, The Destroyed Room. The image was based on the compositional construction of Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicts the Assyrian monarch on his deathbed, commanding the destruction of his possessions and slaughter of his concubines in a last act of defiance against invading armies (3.) Wall’s image, clearly staged (“Through the door you can see that it’s only a set held up by supports, that this is not a real space, this is no-one’s house”) was influenced in part by the contemporary prevalence of the emergent punk-rock aesthetic in fashion-window decoration. The compositional rhythms of Delacroix’s original (the stern tyrant as blocked-in in geometric profile as a kind of bracketing rejoinder to the undulating swoops and humps of concubines and killers, the reflection of a scared horse head in the man-shaped vacuum of negative space that seems to attack all sound) echoed by dumb, distended objects in Wall’s room, also transmit their lavishly fulsome combination of sex & death via the proxy of punk as transgressive advertisement. Compositional tropes have residual memory for painters who learn primarily by watching paintings as opposed to looking at them, a spectator of an event whose duration is both the immediate compositional narrative – the layout- and the pentimenti of its progenitors.

I focus on the safeguards we throw up when ‘looking’ at the barrage of images, on our choices or inability to concentrate on the lives behind the stories when we are exposed to a flood of visual news-media information

For Witvliet, painting’s self-reflexive character is a safeguard and a means of access, door and gate. This is why the resolution to declare the greater composition (the gestalt of the picture, the ‘layout’) comes inevitably at the expense of the individual figure: The Unknown Soldier, the faceless insurgent, the statue viewed in silhouette, the ubiquitous victim. Wittvliet is critical of the media’s distancing ‘safeguards’, the way images are controlled and edited to establish values, but participates in this same control himself, but only after a process of painterly inquiry has complicated things:

A girl being rushed into a hospital, her hands covered in blood, frightened. Normally I would read the captioning and move on. Now, however I spend more time with her. I am painting her hair and it is then that I realize that not too long ago, maybe hours before the ‘event’ her mother might have braided this thick, black hair.

It’s tempting to view this process in redemptive terms as the declaration of ground through sacrifice, as in the formula Heidegger lays out in “On the Making of a Work of Art”, in which “truth establishes itself as a strife within a being that is to be brought forth in such a way that the conflict opens up in this being, that is, this being is itself brought into the rift-design. The rift-design is the drawing together, into a unity, of sketch and basic idea, breach and outline.” (4.) Violence – aligned along a series of breaks with representation – in Witvliet’s work is an attempt to uncouple himself from the process of alienation that has first rendered subjects anonymous.  Their reconstitution as painterly facts presents us with the evidence of that violence memorialized within a serial dialogue of painting’s matters (both the matter it resembles and the matter of its history.)

This is one way to consider the role of ‘ground’ in Witvliet’s work, as his consistent use of Abstract-Expressionist-style invocations of painting’s flatness and horizontality (the drip, the splatter, the pour, the scrape) in assertive counterpoint to the will to render via illustrative line, depictive modelling and deliberate relief. But there are other problems.

Recently, the artist and I discussed the challenge of painting a riot scene without resorting to painterly clichés, a challenge that dates back tellingly to the secular mayhem of David’s Tennis Court Oath and Goya’s Disasters of War. In a mob, there is no divine order, no ladder of angels with which to organize one’s position. As anyone who has ever been part of a mob will tell you, there is no certainty about which side you’re on. In Witvliet’s time, we cannot take a common domain of history for granted in even the most fundamental ways. And this applies to both artworks and historical narrative. And of course this applies to art’s most conspicuous history (its history of representation). As Jean Baudrillard said, drawing from Walter Benjamin, “you can never really go back to the source [of an artwork], you can never interrogate an event, a character, a discourse about its degree in original reality.”(5.)

Without a domain of history, memory is unreliable, peripatetic, decomposing and recomposing itself within disposable frameworks of referential topography. Belgian painter Luc Tuymans characterizes the outcome of this refuse-history as a revenant, a nagging sense of spiritual deja vue that aligns itself with the memorializing faculties of oil paint:

Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have tremendous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void. The viewer should become motionless before the picture [and] freeze [in] a kind of picture terror. […] The effect they should have on the viewer resembles an assault that he or she does not experience directly, but from a distance, initially. When he or she comes closer, this assault should loom again, but on a different level. Something quite unmistakeable then triggers certain emotions, makes certain demands. This can only come about in a certain silence [like] the silence before a storm. It is not about developing feelings of melancholy, but about a certain form of déjà vu…everything could be painting…or, in fact, everything is painting. (6.)

Tuyman’s distinction between a first and second ‘assault’ is a movement from one kind of apprehension and unknowing to another, should be familiar to anyone who has turned away from stories of catastrophe on the news and tried to reason with them either fundamentally (as an individual) or historically (as part of a self-identified community, citizenry or nationality.) Zizek invokes, for instance, the holocaust as both remote myth and untenable reality:

Here, however, are we not confusing two different modalities of trauma that is impossible to integrate into our symbolic universe: the fantasmic narrative of a special event that ‘did not really happen’ (like the Freudian myth of the primordial patricide) and the traces of an event that definitely did happen, but was too traumatic to be integrated into historical memory (like the Holocaust) so that we cannot register it as neutral, ‘objective’ observers, and accept it as part of our (past) reality. (7.)

Moving back and forth from myth to historical (un)reality, we leave a trail of misapprehensions and vexations, like the snail’s trail that Francis Bacon felt his figures traced within the void of his blackest backgrounds. Paint’s ability to shift from terrains vagues to figuration, from glancing film to durable skin (to paraphrase John Cage on Jasper Johns, a surface both naked and self-concealing) is what makes it possible to dwell on both possibilities simultaneously: the horror that the worst might be true and the realization that everything (identity, care, memory, values) will continue inevitably – mythically- just the same.

Painting these people doesn’t give me more knowledge about them. However in the process of painting I start to see them as less abstract. I can no longer see them as disconnected entities, but start seeing them as some ones farther, mother, daughter, son.

Intimacy is produced in the act of transcription and translation. This is never a sure process for painter or other participants, all of whom share some responsibility in the work’s outcome, acknowledging that widening clearing as after all the exhibition space rather than the studio. Hakim Bey coined the term “Temporary Autonomous Zone”, to define the space in which the body can still regard itself as a free entity in an age that spiritualizes the traffic of information at the expense of the body’s more rudimentary duration, compass and ceiling:

Every “fact” takes different meanings as we run it through our dialectical prism and study its gleam and shadows. The fact is never inert or neutral, but it can be both good and evil (or beyond them) in countless variations and combinations. We, finally are the artists of this immeasurable discourse. We create values. We do this because we are alive. (8.)

Here I’m reminded of Witvliet’s architectural sites with their insistent motifs of making and unmaking history: the multi-sectioned supports as if erecting the image (of a tear-down), the anti-monuments of unknown statue and persistent corpse; the Cartesian split between perspectival tunnel and horizontal matrix an insistence on the past’s ruthless access to the onrush of present and future as singular, simultaneous tense.

NOTES

1. Jeroen Witvliet “IN THIS LIGHT…, WHISPER, 24”, [NB. All statements in Italilics are taken from this source], http://www.structure365.com/statements.html
2. Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, (London: Verso, 2000) 41.
3. http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room1.shtm
4. Martin Heidegger, “On the Making of a Work of Art”, Continental Aesthetics: From Romanticism to Postmodernism, edited by Riuchard Kearney and David Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966) 201.
5. Jean Baudrillard, “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age”, from, Artists, Critics, Context: Readings in and Around American Art Since 1945, edited by Paul F. Fabozzi (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002)486.
6. http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/research/WtoS/Turner2.pdf  [full quotation at http://wd.blogs.com/wisch/2004/01/%5D
7. Zizek, 69-70.
8. Hakim Bey, “The Information War”, from, Artists, Critics, Context: Readings in and Around American Art Since 1945, edited by Paul F. Fabozzi (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002)497.

Barrie Szekely: YardSquare

[Written for the Slide Room Gallery, March 2011. In its published form, the last sentence (pertaining to Anne Carson) was omitted.]

“…what’s exciting to me is if I can just catch anything in this great mass that’s turning, turning around. You see, it’s a world apart from language, I mean, the way a real writer would use words.

[…] “I would like to use a child’s hiccups held far off like water dripping as a component of my frame.”

–          Richard Tuttle (1.)

There is a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti called “The Palace at 4AM” that features a series of cryptic forms that look like the parings of known things: a bird skeleton, a spinal column, a chess piece, a ball tipping in a shallow elliptical groove like the gall bladder resting against its liver…Not as themselves but vestigial gestures, rinds curing in the night mind’s swelter and chill. The palace might be an art museum, a treasure house of precious objects estranged from origins, gathered in greed, fiat & caprice, left alone to their histories in the dark of an abandoned castle of matchsticks. It might also be a birdhouse: wing-pinion, spine, organ and queen being more fluid or obdurate states of mind; thoughts in & out of flight.

The objects in Barrie Szekely’s paintings entail similar flip-sides of serviceable and mutable language: they are both facts that emerge into the conspicuous gloss of viewership and/or coordinates intuited in fugitive trace-making. Layered onto the wooden panels day by day, up against void (black ground) or open grain, they form into more stolidly actual pictorial propositions as they develop, but also, conversely (like mislaid names’ mnemonic tokens) less specifically accounted for as things in the world. Intimacy hovers like a tactile reprove; contingencies become paramount. Negative spaces enact unanticipated symmetries. Is that the hungry mouth of an empty glass or the flush, translucent bottom of a jar of jam? Usually something seems left out, as if an object had first acquired a reflection and then disappeared completely, its apparition (like an afterimage) lingering for a moment, a kind of backward salutation from the looking glass.

In Szekely’s studio, which also resembles a workroom, and also a garage, the wilted husk of a seed head sits on a bench waiting to be picked up and considered. After a time in that relatively dim locale it may lose its burden of task at hand and become a more or less ambient fixture between haphazard basement architecture and the behavioural & definitional perimeters of painting space. Consider the moral instruction of still life painting, the way it segregates personal, perceptual, and present-tense. W.H. Auden reminds us that it is not Keats who insists, “Truth is Beauty, beauty truth” but the urn itself (the poet just indicates that it’s what we know, and it’s enough.) Objects trained through the latticework of poetry know a life independent of perception; they are themselves. In Szekely’s paintings, this stubborn nowness is not a problem to overcome in making work; it is the primary condition for working. Working itself might be only another condition, for walking. (What is walking for?)

Rosalind Krauss has pointed out that the grid is the inevitable, self-concealing matrix of twentieth century art. Never seen before its advent, but afterwards, discovered again and again, and each time the artist “always taking it up as though he were just discovering it, as though the origin he had found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction, this graph-paper ground, were his origin, and his finding it an act of originality.”(2.) But Krauss has also described the grid as, “a prison” in which the artist feels at liberty in searching for origins, but challenged in making something new from that beginning, in exercising that liberty, in adding more to what has already been said (3.)

The job of that freedom -to propose yard to studio, to tolerate and integrate shifts of scale and weather, to tether loose form to pattern, inhering call and response- necessitates a chronic absentmindedness. A tool is abandoned in one corner of the yard and its absence begins to weigh invisibly, inevitably elsewhere…Over several seasons, a pocket of oblivion forms, fallow and granular as a pillow cast from dirt. Thoughts in the house, the yard, the neighbourhood undergo gradual alchemical envelopment as indifference oxidizes, hatching pigmentations.

In his poem “Voyelles” Arthur Rimbaud famously gave each vowel a colour (“A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue”) conjuring a state of synaesthesia that also hinted at a chain of being from word to world – “I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins”- in which each letter conveys a terrain of evocation and animation (‘A’ for instance is black, “bright flies” and also “gulfs of shadow”.) (4.) These inventions as interventions are part of the morphological tug of Szekely’s peculiar creation, but they are not so much beginning as suspended, to be observed with a patience and practice that unites artist and materials, seed head to brush stroke. Habits of the mind, they are husbanded in what Anne Carson calls “Decreation”(5.), an undoing of continuity, a movement, not without desire, towards something less sentient.

1. Quoted by Bob Holman, “The Artists Voice Since 1981”, Bomb Magazine BOMB 41/Fall 1992 online at  http://bombsite.com/issues/41/articles/1580
2. Rosalind E. Krauss “The Originality of the Avant-Garde”, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 158.
3. Krauss 160.
4. Arthur Rimbaud, “Voyelles”, trans. Paul Schmidt, (New York: Harper Perennial), 2000
5. Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Vintage, 2006). Carson’s use of this term derives from Simone Weil, as explored by James Pollock in his review, “Anne Carson and The Sublime”, http://www.cprw.com/Pollock/carson.htm

[This essay was originally commissioned to accompany Tyler Hodgins’ installation, “Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?” at the Stride Gallery, Calgary, in September of 2010.]

Afraid to Look

The title for this essay refers both to Barnett Newman’s 1966 painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” and to painter Philip Taaffe’s 1985 riff on the same, entitled “We Are Not Afraid.” Taaffe’s painting can be interpreted as a semantic maneuvering of Newman’s colour field from its existential origin (itself a reaction to Mondrian’s equivocal, geometric composing) to another outcome: frankly plastic, positively ornamental, but not less serious for surrendering abstract autonomy to decorative sociability. It is context that matters here, and the courage to shift the scale with which an iconic image is read from public to personal, even confessional that I would like to address to Tyler Hodgins’ choice of motifs and materials.

What exactly is being confessed? The ambivalence (not to say fear) inherent in Hodgins’ decision to offer his own colour blindness as an impetus to reading this work introduces several important questions. For one, the work potentially unites artist and viewer in perceptual uncertainty. As Hodgins’ piece progresses, its colours are potentially compromised, though just how thoroughly and at what rate remain variables. This slippage echoes the character of colour blindness itself, in many of its varieties scarcely detectible without testing. The confession is also an act of faith: the degradation of colour in Hodgins’ work sets in motion outcomes to which he himself would be challenged to bear reliable witness.

Hodgins’ personal history compounds this sense of confession.  Raised in a Christian Science household, he may have regarded his imperfect vision as something to greet with silent circumspection; the mystery represented by a crayon whose label had worn away was a singularity of personal doubt. Later, in art school, it was secret by default. 1 Colour in this anecdote stands for faith, but is defined by its absence within a continuum of undermining uncertainty; an endless, worldly dust.

Sculptor Gabriel Orozco’s defines just such a “confrontation of colour and dust,” defining dust as both “a negative pigment” and a “totalitarian surface”:

…Everything that gets dusty just becomes surface […] Painting tries to create an illusion, the illusion of volume, perspective or light. It promises a kind of enlightenment through colour […] but dust is the contrary force. 2

Orozco cites the special case of public sculptures, whose default state, he sees as “abandoned to dust.” Hodgins’ practice engages an ongoing involvement with public sculpture projects, underscoring the monumentality of the column-like ‘zips’ of Who’s Afraid. But they also resemble both Pop quotations of Newman’s forms, or their revision as Minimalist sculpture, and in extending the metaphor of dust as a ‘totalitarian’ leveler, we might conceive of the entropy of dust as relatable to other kinds of entropy, such as the inevitable debasement of monuments as enlightening commons to commercial or industrial spaces, kitsch or cliché. 3

The complexities of these quotations have already been mapped somewhat by artists like Taaffe and Peter Halley, who used similar strategies to relate Newman’s zips to decorative/architectonic/technological schematics; not a purist platonic geometry, but, as Halley describes it, “the soft geometries of interstate highways, computers, and electronic entertainment.” 4

Likewise, Hodgins’ vacuum cleaners have a precedent in Jeff Koons’ readymade New Hoover Convertibles (1981-86). Thinking of Koons’ ‘vacuums’ or even Warhol’s ‘Brillo’ boxes, the metaphor seems obvious, that readymade culture is a killer hygiene, destroying all other seminal gestures of meaning. Halley writes that Koons’ perfect vacuums propose a world of model realities, “a state of asepsis and weightlessness.” 5 That Hodgins’ robot vacuums not only clean the sand but (through bumping the columns) trigger more spillage is important. They imagine the underside of the readymade’s spiritualized sheen as a polluting of perception, a totalitarian leveling of the value of visible labour.

It is significant that invisible labour via institutional care completes the cycle of Hodgins’ work: the behind-the-scenes activity of gallery workers emptying vacuum cleaners back into the column-tubes at day’s end. It should be said though, that the work is not so much completed as protracted… The time it takes for hollow columns to retreat from their initial interactive vibrancy to become greyer, more obdurate things is impossible to measure, a collapsible eternity. Ultimately what makes ‘us’ Who’s Afraid is a more subtle, moral entropy, our own inability to track and discern with care over time. As Paul Valéry remarked, “It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increased aversion to sustained effort.” As every compulsive gambler knows, observing the operations of chance too closely for too long engenders a fatigue with the concept of destiny. Like the retinal fatigue that dismays Newman’s painted zips with juddering afterimages, attempts to track the serial overlap of Hodgins’ colours do not reveal their subject so much as dismay it, carrying our attraction to further and further back toward an increasingly unstable instance of material cause. Like Newman at his most integral, Hodgins is interested in marking a human scale, albeit one in time rather than space.

Endnotes

1. Conversation with the artist, August 28th, 2010.

2. Gabriel Orozco, “Gabriel Orozco in Conversation with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (2004)” translated by Eileen Brockbank, October Files 9 Gabriel Orozco, Edited by Yve-Alain Bois (Cambridge: MIT, 2009) 114.

3. Yve-Alain Bois makes this equivocation in addressing the use of cliché in Edward Ruscha’s work, comparing the latter’s trompe l’oeil melting letters to the entropic undoing of articulation – both physical and semantic- in Ruscha’s use of ‘pop’ language. C.f. “Liquid Words,” Formless A User’s Guide, with Rosalind E. Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1997) 124-129

4. Peter Halley, “The Crisis in Geometry,” Arts Magazine (New York, Vol. 58, No. 10, June 1984) http://www.peterhalley.com/.

5. Halley

6. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken books, 1968) 93