I look around the studio, a week since the opening of my recent exhibit, at the pieces underway. “Where do I go, long run?”, I wonder. It’s not about the work. Although I don’t know where exactly how they’ll end up, I am being drawn into their dialogs, and enjoy working things out. No, I’m wondering about the long term, after that opening reception.

In many ways, the reception was fine: a good gallery with an ancestry of forty years’ involvement with avant garde art, a fine crowd, some good experiences and conversations, and a good curating by the gallerist. The “BUT” is that I am disappointed in the sales. I am thinking, now that I am older (many would say that, having made art for fifty years’ I am not “older,” but “an old guy”), what do I do with my hours? This show took many of them. I met with the gallerist; works were chosen; framing had to be done, records kept, photos taken, work transportation overseen, and time spent at the reception. Is all that worth it for “getting out there”? Maybe I should become a painting recluse—doing art but not participating in the art world. So, I’m going to drop this exhibition experience into the universe of the art world, and see what I know.

Conflicts between the experiencing self and scorekeeping self get an artist all tangled up. Here’s an example, not from art, therefore easy to see: Imagine listening to a favorite album for sixty five minutes. Bliss. Then the last five minutes of the recording get distorted and scratchy. If asked how they enjoyed what they just listened to, many would say, “The end ruined the whole experience!” Really? If asked the same question sixty-five minutes into the experience, before the five bad minutes, those same folks would likely say, “Awesome!” Clearly the experiencing self and the scorekeeping self can be at odds. Scorekeeping usually is more strongly remembered.

If our application or proposal is rejected, if a work we love is juried out, if gallerists are not interested—our art experience is, if not “ruined,” considerably dampened. We have ignored the much longer duration of the pleasure of making. Like everyone else who is not an alien, we artists remember our most recent experiences in scorekeeping mode.

Getting “recognized” is important scorekeeping for many artists. It is not the only thing of course, but it is a big thing. Recognition of some sort is very important for us human beings. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, well known for his concept of “flow,” points out in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, recognition by others is one way that shows we are creative for real.

While I know I’ll be making art for the sheer joy, challenge, and involvement as far as I can see into the future, it’s this “art world” thing, this scorekeeping “success” whose worth I’m looking at.

So, okay, what does it take to make it in the art world. The forces involved in getting recognized are revealed in Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World. These forces are both institutional and in human nature. The institutional forces include collectors, curators, gallerists, critics, art magazines, and auctions. What drives the bottom line, the auctions and collectors’ purchases, has little to do with artistic standards and everything to do with status. The art market is display of wealth, purchasing the highest-priced art, to impress oneself and the neighbors. The human forces behind the decisions made in those areas, however, are the most difficult to tease out. We humans are not as open-minded as we think. Both of these, art institutions and human motivations, deserve a deeper look.

Ah, standards. Every age complains about them. In 2800 B.C. Sumerians were writing on clay tablets that the new generation was going to hell in a hand-basket. Especially as an “old guy,” I don’t want to get caught up in that tendency. Besides, I taught college, and know the young people are generally fine and will make the world finer, in spite of the negatives and complainers among them. There is a way of looking somewhat objectively at our times, of getting out of a narrow focus: history. History helps us to understand through comparison, to give a much longer view, and allow focusing on what is really going on now, not just the perceptions generated by our friends and the media.

Let’s do Art History in a paragraph—well, just from the Renaissance on. Renaissance: great revolution, where human life, previously seen as not so important compared to the Divine Eternal (flat people against non-temporal gold leaf), was now inhabited by the Divine, and seen in natural, real dimensions. We humans and our world had God IN us. And, by the way, artists like da Vinci and Michelangelo were not just artisans, but learned voices in society. Skipping through several hundred years of the development of that theme of celebrating society’s accomplishments, we come to the Romantic Period, when artists turned against society, in this case the Industrial Revolution, which revolted THEM. The artist as society outsider picked up steam with Monet’s Gare St. Lazarre following his exclusion from the Salon and his seminal painting Impression Sunrise. The Romantic, outsider image of the artist continued to dominate, even until today. Whereas the Renaissance and Enlightenment affirmed the genius of human nature, now the image of the avant garde artist as against society gained strength. Robert Motherwell, a advocate for the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940’s and 50’s, said that there was nothing to affirm in our materialist society. In the 1960‘s the reactions to Abstract Expressionism and Modernism were many: Pop, Op, Installation, Minimal–unlimited freedom. And then came Postmodernism, in which all esthetic standards of Form as well as verve, affirmation, and optimism were scorned.

“Making it” in the postmodern environment was easier if an artist liked the cynical, the “transgressive,” and abject–which only a limited number could do.

Not only was the “anti-” attitude of art difficult to overcome, but standards for curators and critics, hence galleries and collectors, became nonexistent. “The Art Hunter” [by Ted Allen, Chicago Magazine, January 2003] reveals why the visual arts are getting slammed by theater in the competition for audience. In choosing work for the Venice Biennale 2003 Francesco Bonami, then senior curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art had these criteria: “transformative” works about “sexuality, politics, religion, class.” These are standards? Such criteria are both too narrow in subject and too lacking in esthetics (concern for Form). As an admirable absorber of cultural ephemera, Francesco Bonami was like one of the jurors of an important art exhibition in the Chicago area at about the same time who said, “As we [two jurors] looked through the slides, a shared sensibility emerged. I don’t have a way to describe it.” These standard-less curatorial decisions make art way too faith-based. They empower curators and critics to be something like mumbling high priests. Meanwhile, artists drift in irrelevance to a potential audience that sees very little to like. The situation is sadly funny, since many in the art world think that they are rebelling against an art they consider elitist and are dealing with more relevant, political issues.

Many of these curators and critics are likely smart; how could they be so wrong? The practical answer to that is another question: how could all the smart people in a political group we disagree with be so wrong, while they think the same of the smart people in our group? Clearly, tribal instincts are at work: the culture of the group (tribe) we are with overrides thinking. In showing our agreement with others, we strengthen our relationships with them. Many books explain how we tend to use our intelligence to support our preconceptions rather than question them. The art world’s standard-less, “I don’t have a way to describe” my picks except for “shared sensibility” has ruled for decades, ever since Postmodernism and its focus on words and critical subjectivity took over. Although the postmodern distrust of esthetics (“the retinal,” as they call it) and affirmation seems to be slackening, it still is a powerful force, as seen in this, from the English art critic Jonathan Jones in the April 2012 Art News: “There is nothing worse than good taste…nothing more absurd than someone who aspires to show good taste in contemporary art.”

Lack of identifiable, and therefore discussion-able, standards still exists. In a recent web publication, an influential Chicago art critic, curator, and activist was very excited about the “quality” of art in Chicago. And what were his standards? Works “completely different than what [the artist has] done before.” His standards appear to be newness and attracting the eye of the curator—not exactly standards at all. As for the depth, the critic noted that the work was “masterful,” “loosely based on the ruffles in Velazquez’s Las Meninas.“Ruffles”? Las Meninas WAS masterful because it was a deep look at the role of the artist in seeing, and of humanity itself. To consider the plain loops of the art reviewed as anywhere near masterful and/or saying something about the human condition is to not be thinking at all. (The artist’s works shown may or may not be good works; the example points out the weakness of this curator’s reasons for liking work.) The next artist covered in the publication is admired for showing “new growth and…innovative advancements” (no examples or comparisons from the author to support the dubious claim as to “advancements”). Another subjective judgment, void of standards except “new.” Surely there’s more to the possibilities of avant garde art than new.

However, this mushy irrelevance of no standards except the curator/critic’s subjective sensibility may be changing. Seeking to see if such work is in the majority, I decided to look at the summer issue of The Chicago Gallery News, at the first ten galleries, to see how many ignored Form (depth and esthetic beauty) for subjective or no standards. How many were there? Zero. Yes, none of the ten were as vacuous as the examples from the curator above. Would this finding be borne out on the international stage? I looked at the last Basel Miami, the first twenty galleries in its “Ars Nova” section. Here, the results were not as good, with nine of the twenty appearing to be subjective, over-theoried works rather than discussable under any shared points, the way to look at art until the recent postmodern interruption. Still, this interruption may be ending, as there seem to be more and more galleries, critics, and curators crying “Enough! Let’s find some common ground, other than ‘sensibility,’ for real discussion among ourselves and with the public.” I hope so, both for my own chances and for visual art to emergence to prominence on the cultural scene again, not as some one-page nod in the arts section of newspapers.

For those artists who want to be “Renaissance-like,” to affirm with Beauty and Truth, postmodernism’s sway over the past decades, the lack of standards, has been tough. Knowing that eases the sense of failure from the scorekeeping part of me, the urge to contribute to art history.

And, even if standards did exist, art is not like science, whose standards allow new discoveries to be objectively tested and proven. Alfred Barr, the original curator at the Museum of Modern Art (where standards, even though fought over, existed in the 1940’s) said that he would be happy if one in ten of the contemporary works he bought for the collection was considered worth hanging in twenty years. Great new art moves us forward, but there’s no way to determine for sure which new art is great. Even with standards, it would be tough for an artist to move ahead.

Getting to the attention of a major curator or collector even then was difficult, as becoming famous is for actors. There are many actors as talented as the stars, working in local areas but not having had the luck to be in the right place at the right time, or have the right friends, or have a strong supporter. From Machiavelli to contemporary sociological studies (Kahneman), it is known that luck plays at least 50% in getting what a person wants. If we want to succeed, we need talent, hard work, and luck.

Up to this point, most of the thoughts have revolved around scorekeeping: “How do I stack up against my peers or my own or others’ expectations?” This is a false way to measure the enjoyment of life, however. Recall the person who experienced sixty-five minutes of musical bliss, then felt that five minutes of scratchy distortion “ruined” the experience. Once we get away from scorekeeping, which is VERY hard to do because of our nature, our world is different—it is experienced. How good it feels to get into a painting, and wrestle out meaning! That’s the “flow” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes of. Doing art makes time go away and puts us fully in the moment. Yet, we tend to undercount those hours.

It is this, then, that I must resolve. How much scorekeeping and how much on experience will determine if I become an art recluse? I would never give up the experience of making art. I know scorekeeping depends a lot on chance. Do I have the hours to spend on that chance, though? And what about the people who are moved by the art, say so, but don’t buy? Is it worth my time to create this situation? Perhaps totaling up the hours will help clear things up, help me decide whether to continue seeking to show, to write proposals, to meet people in the art world.

In my current exhibition, there are sixteen works, mostly paintings and prints. I added up a guess of about 300 hours of making. These hours were enjoyable—sometimes difficult, but always involving, and ultimately good experiences. The exhibit took about 25 hours, consulting with the gallerist, framing, packing, and the reception. So, getting a show together is less that 1/10th of the time spent. It’s also less than a regular work week of 40 hours. I’d say that the “non-fun” hours are a small percentage of the creative hours, and certainly not a difficult chore compared to working in a steel factory or doing income taxes.

So, considering hours spent, I think I probably won’t become a painting recluse. Having checked my exhibition experience against the art world, I see that the time I’m devoting to the luck of major recognition is not that great in itself, nor compared to the great time I have making art. Experiencing wins out over scorekeeping. Besides, the art world is becoming more interested in the standards of truth, beauty, and wonder. I can live with that.

About
Robert Stanley has been exhibiting art since 1973. His works evoke a disjointed world, yet connections between objects suggest calm mystery in the chaos of life. Robert has been written about in the Koehnline Museum of Art’s Artwalk at Oakton, 2001 International Digital Art Awards, L’Association Musee D’Art Contemporai’ Une Brève et Ample Énonciation, Chicago Tribune, and The New Art Examiner.

www.robertstanleyart.com

Panel Discussion: New Art Examiner @ The Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL, April 15, 2012. At the end of the panel discussion Derek Guthrie read the following statement which he has graciously allowed Neoteric Art to publish here.

Statement:

My following remarks are only an overview. They are today’s suggested topics for debate. There may be conclusions embedded, but if so they are spare and not well argued for reasons that I have just stated.

Criticism is only talking about art. It is the sharing of opinion. It may be philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, critical theory, cultural policy, literature, poetry, or polemic but it is a requirement of a civilized and a thinking society.

The art world is in a mess. The mess is not different from the mess that our society is in. This is a political issue. It is a social issue. It is a matter of the enfranchised and the disenfranchised. It is a matter of how money is distributed. The art distribution system has to be run on the same principles as how the political system works. Whether our systems in the UK and the USA are good for art is the question. The other question that is available – is art possible or has art died? The successful artists are the super stars like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Whether they are worthy or not is the simple question that is in all of our minds. If we agree or disagree and the reasons why we agree or do not is not only our response to the individual pieces but also a response to the system and power which appoints them as the most significant artists of our time. The issue is complex as is the response to the approved artists places the respondent in a particular position – that he or she will naturally gravitate to others who share the same taste and ways of art is part of social definition. We may change our minds. That can be interesting and could be art criticism.

Our media is dominated by political discussion. Our media is not dominated by cultural discussion and when it does respond it will be inside the tribe of choice – Democrats or Republicans. Somebody once said if you stand in the middle of the road you are hit by traffic moving in both directions.

I think it is reasonable to surmise that many of us, maybe nearly all of us, had the hope – maybe naively – that involvement with art would take us into a world or a way of life that would be free from the veniality of a class-dominated society. The romance and discovery of art, we hoped, would transport us into a mythical world of enlightened people. The 19th century attempt to provide an environment for creative people was the salon. This idea became democratized and was extended into Parisian cafe society – and still today we dream of that dream that in imagination lives. It won an Oscar in Hollywood. The museum and even art departments are the modern attempts to continue and keep alive this ideal, but have betrayed it and are no longer open to people from all walks of life, just those with deep pockets and those who can afford to buy a BFA or MFA. However it was the achievement of the New Art Examiner that we made a little community that loved art and shared enthusiasm with others by the time-honored process of writing. We may have made mistakes but we made a contribution that now cannot now be denied. The most gratifying thing to me resulting from the publishing of the anthology was that it documented how the NAE carried a variety of voices by different editors and writers and removed the demonization of its founding editors. Liberal America emphasizes the idea of pluralism but is sometimes slow to recognizing it, particularly when it is not institutionalized.

The radicalism of the NAE is that it was not afraid of discourse and that ethic should not be considered radical. Maybe it is in present day America but there are still some people who like to think that free speech is an American value. The NAE respected passion. Today the pressures of the recession are activating voices of protest, namely the Occupy movement and a scattering of web sites, finding a space for new voices and seeking a new status quo – and passions are increasing.

The art system is not transparent and while this is so artists will have to live in “cuckoo land” as they operate in a world of which they know very little or nothing – yet they desperately search for approval within it. Artists, unless successful, live in a ghetto. Their hope is that their own significance and originality will filter up. Status and respect will be achieved and then they will move into an “up market” ghetto. This system has been well defined for decades. New York and London have art magazines and a market with academic infrastructure that certifies significant art and distributes it to the regions that usually follow the latest fashion of the avant-garde. Regional centers do not have the critical firepower to establish a new development or wrinkle in the culture of the avant-garde, yet regional art in Chicago made a heroic effort to work inside their own values and culture even though eventually it was not enough. As Phyllis Kind once said to me “There are twenty or thirty collectors of this art in Chicago. I have sold 7 or 10 pieces to all of the collectors. The market has reached its potential and I have to move to New York. I cannot mark up the prices any more.”

In the meantime the same collectors, naturally, were also buying the big name artists made in New York and attending the sales at Sotheby’s. Buying and selling – when it is right to get in and out of the market – is the trick of Futures Marketing. Wildenstein had established an international major New York gallery in the 40’s and 50’s and had a branch in Chicago. It closed its doors in Chicago as the proprietors sold more art to Chicago collectors from the New York gallery than from Chicago.

So the game is like casino betting – maybe with love on loaded chips. The recent collapse of Wall Street is nominated as casino capitalism. That is when rich people – the bankers and the investment houses – are playing with little people’s money along with the failure of government to protect the average saver. The museum is the casino and/or investors club that is the power and the secret information available to social networks of trustee collectors and their helpers the curators. The museums are not regulated and insider trading is given a free license under the rules of not-for-profit status and tax law. There is always a power struggle around art. Particularly today as we are not sure what art is. It is like the dollar being removed from the gold standard and the market deciding its value. The market tells us that McDonald’s is good for me and tasty. We all know it is junk food. The question is, is Jeff Koons junk food for the mind? As Jeff Koons says “the market is the critic.” Talking about hamburgers I cannot but recoil remembering when the Queen of England visited the USA a few years ago. The usual celebrations were put in place. To introduce the Queen to American cuisine the White House decided to provide her, in the Rose Garden, with the best cuisine America had to offer: the hamburger. Andy Warhol, with his genius for the social observation of celebrity culture, pointed out that the hamburger was very democratic as it was enjoyed by everybody – even the Queen of England. The sharing of bad taste is democratic. We are all human but the reaching for something else is of interest and the belief that there is something better is the dream of significant dreamers.

Jane Addams Allen wrote an authoritative article in November 1981 reprinted in The Essential New Art Examiner. She discussed the declining power of the art review well ahead of her time, stating that the independent critic or review was obsolete. The forces of marketing and distribution were too strong. James Elkins wonders Whatever Happened to Art Criticism? – the title of his 2003 book. It is a pity that he did not read Jane’s article. Raphael Rubenstein edited a great book Critical Mess in which leading critics contributed essays pointing to the problems of critics. I quote from Eleanor Heartney – incidentally a writer now in New York – who started her career at the New Art Examiner. Her essay “The Crisis in Art Criticism” is in the book Critical Mess:.

There are practical problems. The venues for art criticism are limited and impose restrictions on what may be discussed. Art magazines operating as trade journals and dependent on advertising for revenue tend to focus on reviews of artists or exhibitions that are in the public eye, while art coverage in general interest publications has a strong bias towards celebrity and entertainment. Academic journals, read by few, often unreadable, and operating largely as tenure generators, are more like private clubs than forums for genuine debate and discussion. As a result certain kinds of essays are never written simply because there is no place to publish them.

There is always a power struggle around art. To pretend otherwise is folly. Some simply believe that wealth does not guarantee discrimination and a greater ability to judge art.

We are here today to talk about the New Art Examiner in the past and whether it possible that it could have a future. The odds do not look good. I would loved to be talked out of this conclusion. It is not for me to say that the blood sweat and tears that the Examiner cost can be repeated. In 1974 everybody thought it would not last more than few issues. If it was to happen again the name and reputation of the New Art Examiner is not in doubt. It now has meaning and is a proven entity. Does that mean support? I do not know. I can guess it may mean some support in the form of grants, and that’s complicated as the giving of grants have their own politics. Getting a grant is like getting an endorsement and that is a question of convincing the giver one has the right social theology and the possibility of success.

The overriding point is that Chicago is not a good place. It was not a good place in 1974. But somehow something happened and we survived. The story of the NAE is partly told in the anthology The Essential New Art Examiner. It is not a history but it has made a history possible. As I wrote in the introduction all of this is the result of community support. The NAE would have disappeared from history if it were not for the vision of one of the anthology’s editors Kathryn Born. Kathryn took the enormous step of commitment to create this book. I learned two nights ago that Richard Seigesmund and Janet Koplos will join forces to write a history of the New Art Examiner and a third collaborator – an art historian – will probably join the team.

What I am moving towards is the reluctance and hostility of the Chicago art hierarchy – museums and art departments which have a studied indifference towards the New Art Examiner or even the idea of criticism outside their walls.

———-

The “Second City” is an empty city. It is also a part of American culture and that is draining away. I do not think that an original and innovative voice can make its way through the labyrinth of procedures – of social networking and deal making, the demands of the market, the politics and academic trading of tenure which in spirit is no different from the trading between congress and lobbyists: money for votes. I am not sure it is a manifested destiny. We all know that the last four governors of the state of Illinois as well as the chief of police have been indicated for corruption and torture. This always leaves the unanswered question – how does this affect the civic life of the citizen? I think it empties it out and makes the situation a vacuum. I believe this sets in place a destiny in which there is no filtering up, only filtering down. This is not good news for those outside the system. It is good for those that mange the system. As Sam Gilliam the Washington D.C. artist once said to me “There are two kinds of artists – ones that move the system and the ones that fit into the system.”

“Manifestation of human achievement” is the Oxford English dictionary’s definition of culture. Chicago around the turn of the century contributed remarkable architecture to American culture. Chicago is the living museum of early modern architecture – the urge to monumentality can be achieved inside the space of real estate. Heroic materialism in its glory adorns the cit and the lakeshore with the exception of the Trump Tower. But what has happened in the alleyways between the tall buildings in the shadows? Gangsters, Nelson Algren, Mayor Daley, Ivan Albright, the Chicago Imagists and the Monster Roster. They all struggle with the dark or are dark. I leave that distinction to you.

We are talking inside the context of Chicago. Chicago is in part my context but I have other contexts as did Jane Addams Allen. The plight of contemporary art is well discussed. Art supports a huge industry of education, trading and investment. This system has been captured by celebrity culture. The strains in our political system are the demands of celebrity culture put on the political system. Hollywood and the White House are interchangeable on and off the screen. Celebrity culture is a culture of mass media, something that Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons analyzed very well and cashed in on.

The difference between the mass market and the museum along with the educational system is that museum and educational system are meant to respond to a different voice than the norm: those that seek something better than the banality or the hum drum of the market. The authority given to those systems, with their tax exempt status as not-for-profit, is based on the idea that thinking and creative production are to be considered inside the idea of the humanities, which is not determined by the strategies of marketing successful products. Yet the market and the academic/museum coalition are in bed with each other. The Republican primary well illustrates the process of making a product or a person to fit into the White House. The marketing is more important than the product. American democracy is degenerating and if that is so then so will the culture. We will have to look to those who resist and art history provides many sterling examples of this to think about. Culture will degenerate unless the subtle tyranny of the media and PR is recognized. Orwell called it “Big Brother” and also pointed to the inventible lust for power in his book Animal Farm where he wrote “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Patronage of art is hoped to have discrimination. It is fashionable, and has been since New York became the world center of contemporary art, to recognize the artist as heroic resister even if he or she is not. Jackson Pollock was a suitable icon during the Cold War as Harold Rosenberg pointed out with his words “the tradition of the new” and “the herd of independent minds.” The new emerging culture may have had built-in defects. I cannot miss this occasion to point out that it was the Partisan Review, a small left-leaning publication, that provided the platform and thinking which developed modern art criticism in the US.

Whatever sophisticated resources mustered by the MCA and the Art Institute they completely missed out on the originality of thinking and the contribution of the New Art Examiner to Chicago culture and the long list of professional writers and academics that emerged from the publication. They responded with usual American or Chicago fear of originality or “difference” as it might be destructive or belong to the other side, usually applied to intellectuals whose primary purpose is not love of money. As George Bush the second said “You are either for us or against us.” I think this thinking is a form of fascism – as is water boarding. The phrase originally came from Lenin.

———-

Chicago is the same town that once carried a literature emanating from large feelings to all men in all tongues, for it was here that those arrangements more convenient to owners of property than to propertyless were most persistently contested by the American conscience. The following words are courtesy of Nelson Algren:

Chicago has progressed, culturally, from the “Second City” to the second-hand city. The vital cog in our culture is not the artist but the middleman whose commercial status lends art the aura of status when collected into a collection of originals. The word “culture” now means nothing more than approved. It is not what is exhibited that matters as much as where – that being where one meets the people who matter.

The people who matter control money. The New Art Examiner survived on a shoestring. A fact of life once observed by Franz Schultz in the MCA catalog Art in Chicago from 1996 was that “the New Art Examiner was the most important thing to have happened in the Chicago scene in the 70’s and 80’s.” He also wrote that “Chicago is an ass hole but it is my ass hole.” I will agree with Franz except his very last observation.

I do not know the details of the death of the New Art Examiner. It became comprised as it moved into the academic orbit – or more to the point the art historians tenure club. I know that it gave up its original cover slogan The Independent Voice of the Visual Arts to be replaced by The Voice of Midwest Art. Jane Addams Allen and myself were elevated to the high sounding title of Publishers Emeritus. But this was a ritual sacrifice in the same way that an animal which is to be slaughtered is adorned with flowers. It signaled our death in the NAE as we could no longer contribute as writers. Even with this caveat it remains true that many excellent and valuable articles were published – but the orbit became restricted.

So the NAE was born as a resistance to censorship and it died when it exercised censorship.

As a matter of interest the 1975 article in The Essential New Art Examiner written by Jane Addams Allen and myself entitled The Tradition was the same article that was lifted three days before publishing by Art News and later accepted by Studio International. I do not think the editors of The Essential New Art Examiner realized that this article was such a cause célèbre. Its content is sane and not destructive. Today it causes no anxiety.

I have to be careful here as I do not want to be seen as whining. The NAE, in spite of its hardships, gave us a dynamic life and a little footnote in history. Occasionally I am invited to give lectures, even if sometimes for no money. I wish to avoid seeming to be the presence as an OLDIE trying to keep in the spot light after his time has passed. I would like to quote from Nelson Algren again – his words are better than mine:

Make the Tribune best seller list and the friends of American writers the friends of literature, the friends of Shakespeare and the friends of Frank Harris will be tugging at your elbow, twittering down your collar, coyly slipping a little olives into your martini, or drooling flatly into your beer with the drollest sort of flattery and the cheapest sort of praise, the grade reserved strictly for proven winners.

But God help if you are a loser and unproven to boot. The bushy tails will stone your name.

Victoria Waxman has made sure we have not made the Tribune list.

———-

Times have changed and online culture is a new element in our lives. However personally I do not think it will eliminate serious print culture. A book or a magazine is an object and has a physical presence. It is not fugitive. A magazine or book has an immediate presence when on the bookshelf.

If the NAE is to return it will have to have an online site. I may have a site donated in England, but the heart will be the community of the office that works together to collect information, discuss information, share networks, and have a place for writers to visit and above all gossip. Even if the new New Art Examiner produces only 4 or 6 issues a year it will be a start. Here I would like to say with emphasis that the NAE did not claim authority other than it collected writers of authority. It was also quite happy to give equal space to all. In this it was democratic. Not that many availed themselves of this opportunity to do so. Roger Brown did once. He called me “Fat Filth.”

Artists, even if not original, are more important than collectors. Artists make art and collectors arrive after the art is made, though I have met some collectors whose company is preferable to some artists.

The system correctly assumes there is a permanent supply of artists just like oil. Oil will run out but artists will not, therefore they have no value. BFA’s and MFA’s are an attempt to gain value. They are the inflow that is needed to feed into the art machine to make sausages of cultural products – as Marcel Duchamp implied with READY MADES – which, if well packaged , adding little spice of publicity, will sell.

———-

The simple point is that Chicago needs a dynamic art publication that is more than boosterism and that has a national art reach, or now an international art reach as the world is shrinking. If there is to be a new NAE it will have to avoid Xenophobia and not be afraid of the local provincial power base.

I dream of a new New Art Examiner in part like the old one – Without Fear or Favor – that will have roots in Chicago but would deal with the wider world of contemporary art in which a new critical language can be found which will be able to review an artist showing anywhere and that will make sense to a reader living far from the exhibition. This is a tall order.

An interesting quirk to be learned from the anthology is that the editors chose two articles by Frank Pannier, an impossible man and an alcoholic who died early. His passion and intelligence still lives – a rare combination. Frank, unlike his colleagues, was not afraid. His fight for authenticity probably killed him but it is a contribution that would have been silenced except for the reprinting of his views. The point is that Frank fought his corner and most are afraid to do so. In conclusion I must say this – that Chicago is so retarded that there is not even a working archive of the NAE in place. Therefore future scholarship and research is denied.

I want to conclude with the words of the only artist in Chicago who has had a street named after him.

Where have all the people gone? Electronic shadows of former selves watching video screens, ignoring the right of refusal….

Paint may seem like an outmoded medium but the human imagination is endless.

Ed Paschke – Speakeasy, February 1981, The Essential New Art Examiner.

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If the imagination can be fired again and if there is enough momentum I would like to help out. I still have a network of active art thinkers who will respond to a call from the New Art Examiner as writing for the New Art Examiner is considered prestigious. I can help out with my experience and knowledge of publishing. I cannot lead it. It has to be the driven by a new generation.

Thank you.

About
Derek Guthrie lived and worked in St Ives as a successful painter in the 60s before moving to Chicago and co-founding, in 1973, the New Art Examiner, an influential American art magazine which continued production until 2002. He moved back to Cornwall in 1996.

The publishing of the best of the “New Art Examiner” is an extraordinary event and bears witness to an important truth, which is that the community has the ultimate power to decide and acknowledge its own reference points of merit and appreciation. In this case the community is led by Kathryn Born and Terri Griffith, who, on hearing stories of the New Art Examiner that still linger discovered with amazement that the copy published decades ago is still vital and has relevance. Their efforts persuaded Northern Illinois University Press to publish the Book “The Essential New Art Examiner” This means that the New Art Examiner will not be airbrushed out of cultural history, which would have its destiny if left to the not so tender mercies of the Art Institutions of Chicago.

I wrote these words many months ago to appear as an introduction to the Essential New Art Examiner. The publishing of the anthology caused two institutional responses: one a two hour seminar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, “Chicago Art Criticism – Past, Present and Future” and also a one day symposium, “Re-Examining the New Art Examiner at Northern Illinois University.

The two events could not have more in contrast. SAIC response was meager, begrudging and sparse. It seemed that the seminar was a forced response by the publishing of the book It would have been difficult to ignore it as the head of Art Journalism and Art History Jim Yood served many years as Chicago editor of the New Art Examiner. However the pulse of the symposium seemed as an attempt to bury the contribution, a goodbye kiss suggesting the magazine was being put on the train into history. There are probably art politically based issues that explain the diffidence factor. For more insight read Diane Thodos’s essay “Art Criticism in Chicago – Dazed and Confused” right here on Neoteric Art.

Not so at the Northern Illinois University – De Kalb event with Barbra Jaffee, the resident art historian. Barbara researched and produced a memorable catalogue and also exhibition of the New Art Examiner. This event demonstrated the New Art Examiners’ history and evolution through its 30 years run which was evaluated and the conclusion reached that the New Art Examiner had made an important contribution to American art criticism, more than Chicago’s requirements. The excellent scholarship was a triumphant of recognition considering the outsider status imposed on the New Art Examiner. As criticism was the focus at De Kalb the issue of cultural power politics was not probed though vaguely acknowledged. However the fact that the New Art Examiner professionalism is now authenticized may provide a solid stepping stone in a possible future.

To a point the community in Chicago is reawakened to the dynamic of yesterday. This has prompted Norah Dieterich the director of the Evanston Art Center to offer free office space to relaunch the New Art Examiner. This generous offer can be taken as indication of how the community or even the city misses the New Art Examiner.

Easier said than done. The blood, sweat and tears that were mobilized in 1974 may not be available in 2012. On the other hand the achievement of the New Art Examiner is now without question and that might shake support loose that was not available before.

I quote from Nelson Algren, Chicago’s greatest poet:

“Make the tribune best seller list and the friends of American writers and the friends of literature,the friends of Shakspeare and the friends of Frank Harris, will be tugging at your elbow, twittering down your collar, coyly sneaking an extra olive into your martini, or drolling flatly into your beer with the drooliest sort of flattery and the cheapest grade of praise;the grade strickly preserved for winners. But God help you if you are a looser and unproven to boot. The bushytails will stone your name.”

and

“Chicago has progressed, culturally, from being ‘The Second City’ to being ‘The Second-Hand City.’ The vital cog in our culture now is not the artist, but the middle-man whose commercial status lends Art the aura of status when he acquires a collection of originals. The word ‘culture” now means “approved”. It isn’t what is exhibited so much that matters as where; that being where one meets the people that matter.”

I go to Evanston to share experience and I hope a revival will be possible. We all know criticism has died and the New Art Examiner proved otherwise. I simply go to see if such a possibility is possible.

About
Derek Guthrie lived and worked in St Ives as a successful painter in the 60s before moving to Chicago and co-founding, in 1973, the New Art Examiner, an influential American art magazine which continued production until 2002. He moved back to Cornwall in 1996.

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On Chicago Art Criticism: A Panel Discussion
Date: Sun, 04/15/2012 – 1:00pm – 5:00pm

New Art Examiner co-founder Derek Guthrie and an intergenerational panel of local art writers discuss the historical significance and future of art criticism in Chicago. The dialogue will touch upon the current discourses of modern and postmodern approaches to art criticism, art writing, new arts journalism, institutional authority and influence (art schools, art museums, etc.) as well as contemporary art strategies that are shaping culture now. The perceived goal of this event is to establish certain histories and commonalities that can move our city forward.

Panelists currently include: Kathryn Born, W. Keith Brown, William Conger, Andrew Falkowski, Derek Guthrie, Annie Markovich, Bert Stabler, Diane Thodos, and Lauren Weinberg

We hope you will join us for this important discussion, which will be held at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road in Evanston. This event is free and open to the public. Donations are always welcome.

Evanston Art Center

Re-Examining The New Art Examiner Symposium at Northern Illinois University on January 28, 2012 with Panelists Derek Guthrie, Josh Kind, Buzz Spector, Richard Siegesmund, Janet Koplos, Paul Krainak, Alice Thorson, Lynne Warren, Michael Bulka, Jennie Klein, and Susan Snodgrass.

The New Art Examiner was born out of censorship. ~ Derek Guthrie

As long as you don’t have a vetting process it’s hard to have credible critics. ~ Michael Bulka

You get what you pay for. You need an editorial framework so that you have some kind of entity that has a mission. ~ Alice Thorson

This much anticipated seminar at Northern Illinois University went far in amending the absence of provocative and historically informed voices about the New Art Examiner (NAE) that were not present at the School of the Art Institute’s art criticism panel on November 22, 2011. I begin with a rich exchange between Derek Guthrie, co-founder of the NAE, and several panelists on the critical subject of patronage in the arts.

Derek Guthrie: The elephant in the room is very simple. What are the strings attached to patronage? I don’t care whether it’s an industrialist, The National Endowment for the Arts under Democrats or Republicans, collectors, or academia. They are all systems of patronage and they are called reward systems. We have spoken about the NAE and its different evolutions and it is quite clear (and it delights me very much) that was started a long time ago under different editors. Somehow certain aspects of a certain kind of thinking repeated itself from generation to generation- with variations. The Examiner came from community. The Examiner was forced to live in community. This seminar, by serendipity and accident, has been a revival of community. I’m not going to make a definition of what community is or isn’t, but I’m old and I know what cultural fashion is. All generations start inside the fashion of their time….the issue of originality is absorbing the fashion and then getting out from under it, because if not then you die with the fashion of the time….New York stole the idea of the avant-garde from Paris. I happen to know what Paris was like. I’m lucky. The point is that the Americanization of the avant-guard is the cultural context which the avant-garde was shoehorned into. It is quite clear at this moment in time, for whatever reason you like, that it [the avant-garde] has waned and its dynamic is gone. So when I look back at art, I look back to between WWI and WWII- [Europe was] devastated, bombed to hell. Millions of people were on the street and angry. Guess what? It produced all the art and we still value it. So all I want to say is this…I think we have lost language. I think we don’t know how to address issues any more. I think it’s a cultural problem…I think this is our moment in time. I also think it might be a great moment…that the nature of modern art came out of a time when it was like this…we are exactly coping with the same kind of weird space and weird individualism that we happen to be living under. It [the NAE] could happen again. It’s very simple. You need 8 pages, you need an editor, you need a few writers, you need a few articles, and you publish – beginning and end of story. What’s more it would be easy because we got a brand name that everybody likes.

Jennie Klein: The NAE had the ability to recognize the cultural conditions and was somehow able to move above them, and that’s why the magazine was important and continues to be so.

Derek Guthrie: We never fell into the crap of being rewarded because nobody gave us a reward. James Elkins who is the chairman of a very important department of the SAIC published a very important book called “Whatever Happened to Art Criticism”, and this is a very good book and I like it…we all know what he reported on. That’s not the issue. It’s a cultural issue…the NAE, with little or no support and with great hostility [against it] came out of Chicago and James Elkins sits on the throne of Chicago culture. Why could he not recognize the phenomenon that we are all around here to say? – because we made art criticism and he did not acknowledge it.

Richard Siegesmund: What we have [today] is criticism that works within the academy. There is dialogue about establishing community. Those are two different things. Those are both called criticism. We get them switched back and forth all the time. Part of my own vibration in terms of art education …is that we don’t talk about the kind of art theory that James Elkins in talking about. We try to engage dialogue with students in order to create community in a kind of democratic space. The Examiner was clearly about that – the John Deweyan community aspect. That’s why the National Endowment for the Arts excluded [the NAE from funding] – it was ‘reporting’, it wasn’t ‘theorizing.”

Jennie Klein: [Compared with the UK] the academic system here in the US is flawed. It’s also very tied to tenure, which makes Elkins a big deal. He’s published a lot with respectable publishing houses whereas many of the Examiner writers were not big deals in the same sense that Elkins is.

Richard Siegesmund: There is the problem of editorship…with analysis. There is a problem of who is getting written about and why. We are in an age when the motives of institutions are questionable. I am enough of an insider of the art world that I saw some heavy duty sausage being made – with a lot of critical cover put over it so you don’t see the sausage making…its’ happened in the international biennale marketplaces.

Starting from the beginning of the discussion it was clear that the presence of Derek Guthrie and his perceptions on the heady spirit in which the NAE was born was the centerpiece of the seminar. The panelists consisted of former writers and editors brought many meaningful – sometime contentious – experiences and philosophies to the debate, plotting out how the discernable changes in the NAE’s content was based on who was editor at that time. Much discussion centered on how contention between the NAE and institutions of power in the art world – particularly the Chicago art world – developed and why.

Barbara Jaffee, Associate Professor of Art History at NIU, began with a brief summation of the importance the NAE assumed in the history of art criticism – a useful overview that was printed in a catalogue produced for the seminar – The New Art Examiner: Chicago’s “Independent Voice of the Visual Arts” 1973 – 2002. She opened by quoting the magazine’s original statement of purpose “by promising – and delivering – an often sharp-edged critique of…”

“The definition and transmission of culture in our society: the decision making process within museums and schools and agencies which determine the manner in which culture shall be transmitted; the value systems which presently influence the making of art as well as its study in exhibitions and books: and, in particular, the interaction of these factors with the visual art milieu…”

The catalogue outlined the NAE’s most potent years “Without Fear or Favor” 1973 – 79, followed by “Redefining Regionalism 1980 – 1992” and finally “Down and (eventually) Out 1993- 2002”, tracing its trajectory as a muckraking and art critical hub for a restless and energetic arts community to it’s final demise. Jaffe contrasted the NAE’s high quality editorship at its beginning from the editing in its declining years.

The intricate politics do not begin to account for the magazine’s true significance….where once the magazine had set its sights on making visible the hidden operations of institutional power, it was now equal parts poetry and politics…at it’s most principled such critical theorizing may seem like nihilism.

Following Jaffee Kathryn Born, founder of the online Chicago Art Magazine and co-editor of the newly published book The Essential New Art Examiner discussed her meeting with Derek Guthrie several years ago. “It was this fighting spirit that I found Derek and I had in common.” She saw the role of the rebel who rejects popular opinion as important. “Keep an eye out for disloyalty ….the person who seems unpopular has managed to tick off everybody and that just might be an excellent sign.” Co-editor Terri Griffith discussed the publication’s boisterous muckraking verve which died in its later years. “The NAE started out as a newspaper for artists and ended as an art criticism journal.”

On the first panel Derek Guthrie was joined on by Professor Josh Kind, a former contributing editor to the NAE, and artist Buzz Spector who is presently the art department dean at the St. Louis based Washington University. Guthrie described how the NAE came into being when he and his wife, NAE co-founder Jane Addams Allen, were dropped from writing for the Chicago Tribune and how a commissioned article was killed from being published in Art News. Regarding this cause and effect he mentioned “I heard through the grapevine that a letter writing campaign was organized by the MCA….thus the NAE was born out of censorship.” The essence of the magazine was the result of the chemistry between the two. For Jane that included the belief in the philosophy of her famous aunt Jane Addams. “Jane Addams made Hull House available to everyone, even Communists and Anarchists, for the simple reason that she believed what was quintessentially American was the constitution, and that was the right to free speech.” He described how the NAE came out of the 50’s and 60’s generation – a time filled with change, movements, and social dynamism.

We never hired a single person to write a review about an institution that they had an affiliation with. We didn’t care if someone wrote a good [positive] or bad [negative] review. I think the NAE gained a certain strength because it did that….We always assigned a review to what we knew to be the exact opposite of that person’s taste, and guess what? 9 times out of 10 that was the better review.

Spector mentioned that when he started working for the NAE he felt torn between careerist conformity and the desire to speak truth to power. The office at the NAE was

…the most striking culture of discourse and argument that I was ever privileged to participate in… the drug of choice was argument. As acerbic and sharp and incisive as some of the writing published for the magazine was, the arguments in the office were even better…it was an ethical training ground. We were constantly pushing back the notion we should be comfortable with what we wrote. It was about connecting of that personal experience…to a set of social, political and environmental circumstances. In this way the NAE was truly ahead of its time…. [it] was never corrupt, occasionally self-pitying but never corrupt. Corruption in this context means being comfortable with power.

Josh Kind spoke briefly on his regular writing of the column Thick Tongue published in the magazine’s beginning years. It was “an antidote to the engagement of unconscious pretense. Thick Tongue was always about shooting that down.“ He also mentioned his passion as a teacher and how important it was for his students to form a community to talk about their work after graduating. The NAE served a concrete purpose with its art audience. “The public needs the translation of art into another dimension – that language brings people closer to their feeling for art.”

Guthrie continued with his salvo on the decadence of current conditions in the mainstream.

To talk about art and not talk about the context of the larger world and the politics within which artists are creating is cheating the entire community….the publishers today cater to blue chip galleries and selling ads that do not want to alienate anyone. But for good publishing to survive it’s going to need sincere readership – people who enjoy content.

When discussion turned to the relevance of reviving the NAE today Guthrie replied, “Of course it is. Why not? It should happen. There’s no where for critics to go” and mentioned SAIC professor James Elkin’s book Whatever Happened to Art Criticism? which describes much about the source of this crisis.

A question was raised regarding the objection to the Essential New Art Examiner’s co – dedication to Kathryn Hixson, the editor who oversaw the period when specific changes in the quality of the magazine’s critical content occurred and who was active at its demise in 2002. Guthrie responded

I cannot sign off on censorship.…Kathryn was an academic. She wanted a full time position [at SAIC]. She had her passions…She was sincere and I have no problem with sincerity…the NAE got institutionalized inside of academia and academia will impose ways of doing things. The larger issue is what is the effect of academia on art? I would argue that if you take a population of artists there is a whole game that is not being talked about. Look at the history of Circle Campus. Look at the history of the Art Institute. Look at who does get and do not get teaching jobs…[it’s about] patronage, content, in other words a rewards system. Who is giving the rewards and what are the rewards for? Who do they and do they not give them to because they do not conform to the game that certain people are playing?

The moderator for the second panel, Richard Siegesmund, focused on the NAE’s years from 1980 – 92. He is Associate Professor of art education at NIU and was deeply influenced as a writer by Jane Addams Allen when he worked in the NAE’s Washington office. Panelist Janet Koplos, a long time writer for many art magazines including the NAE, described her primary focus on craft, and how this had been sidelined by the mainstream art world. “Craft is an underdog field.” She spoke about how Derek and Jane embraced craft as an important subject of art that deserved deeper focus and contrasted her writing against formalist and deconstructionist writing approaches. Siegesmund replied “at the time [Greenberg] wrote craft was not part of the orthodoxy…the NAE was open to challenging that error.” MCA Curator Lynne Warren mentioned, “It wasn’t as much a craft and fine art dichotomy as much as it was [about] materiality” to which Koplos responded “Skill is still an issue though…perhaps that’s the stigma.” Paul Krainak added that Chicago had been more associated with “the history of object making rather than the production of theory.” As a student of Josh Kind he recalled the necessity to

take responsibility for the contextualization of your generation’s work…the rise of alternative spaces [Artemisia, Name Gallery] and the NAE happened at about the same time. They nurtured each other – made each other vigorous and healthy. Chicago was considered a healthy place to begin a career – you could get your ideas out.

Siegesmund talked about the importance of government programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, before the money dried up under the Reagan Administration

[they] kicked the slits out from under the visual arts program and the NAE. But there was a moment of what I would call almost an experiment with European cultural thinking in this country….[government] was able to put up the bucks to support something like NAME Gallery. There was this moment of possibility created by government support of the arts which we had not seen since 1900 or so.

He also added that because of the fragility of funding to these alternative spaces “to actually give a critical analysis [of the art] was perceived as hurtful to the organization.”

A relevant quote from Barbara Jaffe’s catalogue – by Maureen Sherlock – explained how the culture wars of the 1980’s and subsequent funding loss led to the end of an era

The decision of the Reagan administration to both privatize support for the arts and the insistence that all institutions receiving public support follow standard business practices…[was] the death knell for more spontaneous responses to issues of the day [and] led to a vast system of both internal and external censorship.

Lynn Warren had written an article for the NAE on alternative spaces, but added that she was predominately “on the other side of the fence” working as a curator for the MCA. There was “perceived and maybe outright hostility between these two institutions from time to time.” She read an article from the NAE that described how both the MCA and Art Institute stores refused to carry the NAE because of its negative press. Warren mentioned that “throughout the 70’s the NAE wrote little or nothing about shows happening at the MCA.” Koplos responded that criticism in America is used as a form of PR and “Derek and Jane did not practice that…the expectations were that the dialogue would not be ‘respectful.’” Krainak added how in the past students took the responsibility for the discourse around their work but now you “get a curator to do it for you” and how the National Endowment for the Arts defunded the NAE because it deemed it’s writers were unqualified. They weren’t “theorizing in the way that was expected of the art world.”

An audience member asked if the visual arts in Chicago are being hampered because there is no publication that has replaced the NAE’s function. Warren mentioned there are lots of art blogs with greater access but more fragmentation “no one can get through everything out there.” Siegesmund replied

One thing the Internet does not have are editors. The Internet does not have librarians. The role of those very contentious [NAE] editorial board meetings …as much as they were wide open and their wasn’t censorship…is there were still standards of editorial guidance.

Alice Thorson, a former editor of the NAE and arts columnist for the Washington Times described how she was struck by Guthrie’s editorship. “What Derek did …was to really hold the art world’s feet to the fire in terms of letting everybody in.” This included embracing Feminism, lobbying on their behalf, writing about African American artists, and covering the crafts.

A question was raised about how critical dialogue and dialectic that engages an art audience has died and has been replaced by impenetrable theoretical discourse – was this the reason why the NAE lost its critical focus in its final years? Krainak recalls “how focused criticism was out of grad school in the late 70’s.” Art had much more clearly defined boundaries, whereas “what the art object is [today] has changed dramatically” which creates the problem of focus and generating a dialectic around it. Barbara Jaffe added that The NAE “flew in the face of theorizing” by focusing on the art object itself which theorizing did not do. “There is a tension there.“

The final panel began with writer Susan Snodgrass who described her early aspirations as a political reporter in Washington D.C. and switched to art writing for the NAE in the 80’s. “I was very happy to be working in what I saw as real true journalism.” Michael Bulka, who wrote regular columns for the NAE loved the “Raging arguments” his opinion created and missed “the passion that was generated on those pages – I would live for someone complaining about something I wrote. I would say stuff just so people would come after me.”

Siegesmund added “the Examiner let you address issues of community” rather than objects. Bulka replied “It’s not about objects anymore, its all about the delivery system – economics, sociology, politics – they will never be bringing in the weirdoes.” Jennie Klein, associate professor at Ohio University, wrote for the NAE in the 1993 – 2002 period when Structuralist theory was on the ascendancy. She expressed strong interests in Feminist and performance art and “the de-materialism of the art world” citing influence from writers like Doulas Crimp and Roland Barthes. Bulka raised his objections to this kind of writing. “I really hated the poststructuralist theory.” Siegesmund responded

Since Hegel and Marx we have been theorizing about art and we have an American exception to that – John Dewey and American Pragmatism – looking at art through experience and perceptions without theory. Dewey began in Chicago and was friends with Jane Addams. I see an element of Pragmatism in the way the Examiner started, and I think there is a case to be made that what happened in the 1990’s was the collision of American Pragmatism with European Continental Theory and we have still not sorted our way out of that collision yet.

A question was asked – how do we find an ideal forum for art criticism today? Michael Bulka replied “Part of the problem is editors are really important… [in the blogosphere] any monkey can have access. With the Examiner the writer needs to be vetted by an editor. As long as you don’t have that vetting process it’s hard to have credible critics.”

Jennie Klein mentioned “most of us were too young to have participated [at the NAE] in those halcyon days of the mid to late 70’s. We are going through a very strange period in American art history, very reactionary. I wonder if we will ever get back to such a great period for the arts.” Alice Thorson criticized the support for blogs as a substitute for art criticism “Do you get paid for that? You get what you pay for. You need an editorial framework so that you have some kind of entity that has a mission.”

Many of the audience questions did express that we need a new critical consciousness and the vitality of the NAE in our public sphere. During the last set of panelists it was rather chilling to hear one of the audience members ask what is the alternative to our current art writing options– descriptive journalism for commercial media or unvetted blogs. The panel gave no answer. This silence couldn’t help me from thinking the degree to which the ability to even imagine alternatives or resistance to the present systems has disappeared from the consciousness of the professionals in charge of the art world. Current BFA’s and MFA’s graduated from conceptual and theory oriented art programs like to wear the avant-garde badge – but isn’t this in fact disguising what is actually a rear-garde market servility, cynicism and apathy? As Guthrie mentioned, that avant-garde vitality has waned. The more that art writing media and institutions are incapable of supporting real critical consciousness the more that change will only be possible from the margins outside of power. Sound familiar? I will end with a quote from a recent January 2012 issue of Art in America article by Erin Sickler entitled Art and the 99%.

One error was abandoning our former resistance, our dedication to humane alternatives, and caving in completely to the market-only syndrome…once radical-institutions have seen their missions diluted by the corporate values of their funding institutions. Government cuts, which we have failed to stop, have allowed corporations and wealthy patrons to grow increasingly dominant in the culture sphere.

There will be a continuation of this seminar with a panel discussion aimed at opening up debate about problems in the contemporary art world, the revival of critical discourse and the NAE. It will be happening on April 15th 2012 from 1 – 5 pm at the Evanston Art Center 2603 Sheridan road (847) 475-5300. It is free and open to the public and panelists will include Derek Guthrie, Diane Thodos, Annie Markovich, Keith Brown EAC Director of Education, and SAIC professor Andrew Falkowski among many others to be confirmed in time. Hope to see you there!

Derek Guthrie

Derek Guthrie, Josh Kind and Buzz Spector

Richard Siegesmund

Lynne Warren

Paul Krainak

Buzz Spector

Michael Bulka

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Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in 2009 and is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

The current traveling exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series offers a unique opportunity for viewers to participate in the artist’s grand achievement as negotiators – and re-negotiators – of visual dynamics and material effect.

“The painting is the story that is presently searching itself out.” – Jennifer Meanley¹

“I am amazed that some people can be so lacking in anxiety as to imagine that they have grasped the truth of their art on the first try.” – Matisse²

It is not often one gets to see a significant portion of a major artist’s oeuvre in one place at one time. We are used to knowing the canon of art history via the mediation of reproductions – such as they are – and often spend decades only imagining what the surfaces and colors actually look like. Taking cues from the few works we get to see, we extrapolate and do our best to apply what little direct knowledge we have to the pictures in glossy catalogs or musty old monographs, never really knowing how limited our grasp of the work might be.

So it is that artists and lovers of art value traveling to see great works of art in person. We make the Louvre, the Prado, and the Uffizi points of pilgrimage. We do our best to be with the works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, to test out the feel of Rothko and El Anatsui, to walk along Goldsworthy’s wall or Smithson’s jetty. We solemnly venture into the interior space of Chartres or the resonant words of Elizabeth Bishop. These real-world experiences prove the truth of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura”³ of artworks, and they raise our visual IQs as we experience art in as direct a way as possible.

Having the opportunity to see a great number of Richard Diebenkorn’s iconic Ocean Park Series paintings together in exhibition has been something I have looked forward to for many years. My initial exposure to Diebenkorn’s art was through images of the Ocean Park works during the first few days of my undergraduate art school experience. In many ways these reproductions – and my subsequent reading about the works and artist – calibrated my entire perspective on painting in particular and art in general.

Over the years I have taken every opportunity to see Diebenkorn’s paintings in person. Given my placement in the Midwest, most of my repeated visits have been in that region: in Cincinnati, Chicago, Des Moines, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. But these examples left something to be desired. In Des Moines, Ocean Park #70⁴ was hung devastatingly close to an untitled Anselm Kiefer – the German master’s massive work was a stentorian presence that muffled the light and line of Diebenkorn’s piece. At the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Diebenkorn’s Interior with a Book⁵ is cracked and dimly lit. Other viewings suffered similar fates.

Thus more often than I would like to admit I have been disappointed rather than excited by my encounters with Richard Diebenkorn’s actual work. None of the paintings I had seen seemed as powerful as I had expected or hoped; they had been situated in the midst of other artists’ works, without enough breathing space in art fairs, or otherwise depraved of sufficient context of their own. Was I responding to some quality apparent in the reproductions but absent in the actual works? Was I merely uninformed, my assumptions tailored to expectations that the paintings could never meet? Was my sense that it was the cluttered museum context that failed them rather than some problem with the works themselves just wishful thinking?

Thankfully, this was not the case. The fourteen years I spent reading all I could find and tracking down what was available to see near me did not prepare me for the majesty of a whole space given over to the proper presentation of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings. The first iteration of Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, laid any lingering fear aside and cemented for me the power of Diebenkorn’s mature vision as embodied in the series. Fort Worth gave the works both dignified space and illuminating sequence, offering broad, expansive views and the opportunity to sense the deep connections and synergies that exist within this astounding body of work. In this setting where the paintings could breathe and sing in concert, I was able to more keenly perceive the underlying structure and deep-seated provisionality that operates in the Ocean Park Series.

—

That word, provisionality, is perhaps the most particular and necessary one that I will use in my further discourse on the work in this traveling exhibition. There has been much discussion about “provisional painting” of late, stimulated by Raphael Rubinstein’s May 2009 Art in America article identifying practitioners of this mode of painting – artists such as Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, and Mary Heilmann. Rubinstein describes provisional painting as “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-canceling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.”⁶

Sharon Butler, a painter, writer, and professor at Eastern Connecticut University, expanded on “the centrality of the open proposition in contemporary abstraction”⁷ in a 2011 article for The Brooklyn Rail. Butler talks about this approach to painting as “a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness” and “subversion of closure” that exists within “multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right.” Artists working in this vein, Butler suggests, “cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure.”⁸

Butler’s and Rubenstein’s exploration of provisional or “casualist” painting today could be interpreted as an indictment rather than a celebration, yet it seems to me that they are on to something. I submit that there was provisional painting before its current practitioners surfaced, and it found its varying degrees of unfinished tentativeness through a negotiation of “rightness”⁹ rather than an acceptance of “the not quite right.” I believe that we see this in the work of artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Edvard Munch, as well as in the impulses of the Vorticists, the Fauves, and even the Impressionists. It goes without saying that Cubism participated in – even paved new avenues to – this arena. Making artworks through the calibration of a feeling of rightness beyond the expression of perceptual or conceptual truth – indeed, the denial of these things as entirely definable ends – is at the root of a provisional approach. This proclivity is distinctly evidenced in the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

To be sure, Diebenkorn’s methods and aims were far removed from those of the artists currently carrying the mantle of provisional painting. It seems to me that the artist inhabited a middle ground between the heroics of the abstract expressionists and what too often feels like the deadpan ennui of contemporary provisionalists. His mode and facture brought the flittering tenuousness of choice and perception to center stage and offered a vision of seeing and making that continued to move pictorial logic away from an if/then proposition to a both/and one. In the following paragraphs I will explore what I identify as Diebenkorn’s penchant for provisional action and show how it stimulates a provisionality of vision in his audience.

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Diebenkorn encoded provisionality in his work not via a “casual, dashed off” quality – though spontaneity and “commitment to improvisation”¹⁰ were key to his process – but by embracing uncertainty and tentativeness within an overarching compositional format. His working method was comprised of questioning choices and negotiating varied factures within a particular compositional schema: a “definition and re-definition of the relationship of line and tonal field.”¹¹ His work became a ceaseless reappraisal of the rightness of the constellation of visual dynamics in effect at any particular time within the work at hand.

Unlike the provisionalists of today, Diebenkorn was deeply concerned with the aforementioned rightness as well as with a necessary openness of potential action. His notion of rightness seems to have been related to a modernist sense of compositional balance and a feeling of effective effort toward that end through material and its application. In all of this Diebenkorn pursues his rightness while recognizing that it is not a specific, definite end. Therefore the openness he sought could be described as a desire to maintain the potential for each choice – whether of the artist in making or the viewer in looking – to have true over-all effect and discernable affect. These two seemingly opposed ends are set together, providing an arena for possibilities to begin or end, to coalesce or dissipate. Though we recognize that, in a very real sense, the works are forever locked in stasis since they can no longer physically change under the artist’s hands, we see that they can shift and modulate under the eyes of viewers.

This is exactly what they do. Diebenkorn’s paintings invite us to collaborate with – and second-guess – his choices in an active yet elusive viewing of the potential of the works to be what they are, or to become what they might be. The viewer participates in working out the rightness of the image and in so doing critiques its success. The Ocean Park Series is an investigation into the prospective and shifting nature of both painting and vision itself.

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To get a clear view of Diebenkorn’s connection with provisionality one must think about the sense of compositional balance exemplified in the Ocean Park Series. It is a balance that is hard-won yet still teetering on the edge of disarray. Though the works are in some ways locked, they flicker and undulate; these are compositions that don’t always feel as if rightness was absolutely achieved. When I initially encountered the series in books I was not aware that Diebenkorn was seeking that sense of rightness so often considered as his chief aim. I felt that the works exhibited a rather unbalanced, clunky sort of tension among their various parts. Years later, I still hold this view, but only as they read in reproduction, not as they appear in person.

Consider Ocean Park #38.¹² On the printed page or pulled from the web, this work presents an almost unbearably fast, tilted read; our eyes shoot to the top left, swiftly running over the sharpness of the interwoven diagonals there. These dark forms contrast with the rest of the image, their “V” shape and separation from the rest of the work standing out with iconographic strength. The painting is unbalanced and top-heavy.

In person the effect is dramatically reversed. Surface, color, line, and application become supercharged with multivalent weight and effect. The lower mass of light-infused color rises up slowly, monolithically, to countermand the angular insistence of the upper edges of the painting. The combined physical reality of the works – the symbiotic nature of their formal, material, and chromatic characteristics – is absolutely necessary to the true experience they stimulate. They are not balanced in a straight compositional sense at all; they are instead balanced via the interdependent visual effects that they initiate and propagate. We do not read these works directly by receiving all of their parts at once. Instead we wade through the indirect information they provide and must circle back for second, third, and fourth viewings to accumulate a semblance of the full experience.

Diebenkorn worked to orchestrate and manipulate the layered, syncopated reading of his paintings by making his various strategies, attempts and dead-ends the direct means by which we, the viewers, open them up. He enlivened the surface with arenas that take diverse levels of effort to move through, that require different visual solutions to understand. Yet these compositional forces and the quality of balance they achieve are illegible in reproductions of the works. They are, in a sense, unavailable to the eye in reproduction because it is the action of the eye playing over the actual surface that constructs – or rather works to reconstruct – the quality of rightness Diebenkorn sought. Our eyes alternate in stalling or speeding through the scintillating fields of line and hue, pausing in certain locations only to find another form, element, or color effect coalescing into importance before us. John Elderfield saw this effect in how the equally essential figure and ground aspects of Diebenkorn’s paintings so often seem to “fluctuate and interchange in importance… the surface vibrates like a translucent skin as if the space it encloses is the full and living space within the body.”¹³ The works flatten and bloom, are at once deep iridescent seas and impenetrably dense walls. They are simultaneously snapped to the bare grid and densely interwoven in layers. They are both “aperture and field.”¹⁴

Indeed, colors and shapes may flicker into resolution after sustained viewings; structures float up while others – previously more apparent – seem to drop away. This is a major aspect of reading the paintings and of perceiving the movement and weight they possess. The pieces play on the ability of our eyes to capture latent images and sustain them while interpreting subsequent visual sensations. There is a kind of planar phase transition in these works, something that rests on the dual nature of our eyes: ceaselessly motile yet able to retain aspects of what has been seen.

Thus the formalism at work in Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series seems directly connected to vision itself. It is in our activity of perceiving his work that the provisional nature of Diebenkorn’s painting has its power. The lines push us out or lock us in. Analogous angles sync up, seeming to define particular shapes, only to dissipate upon a second glance. An area of color that one once read as flat may instantly project out dimensionally and stimulate a sense of vertiginous parallax. The glacial movements of color fields counteract the speed of linear diagonals; they seem both dense and weightless. Edges where two colors meet may simultaneously indicate low spatial relief and mere tonal variation along a level plane. Open areas take on strength as they hold large swaths of canvas against the complexity and tension of the smaller, more active, geometric, or hue-charged areas. The artist’s famous pentimenti stall the route of one’s eyes and trap them into recursive delays amid muted apparitions of texture and shape.

These pentimenti are more visible and more powerful, and their importance all the more apparent, when one takes in a large swath of the Ocean Park works at once. Their functions in the paintings, how their varying uses may shift from cursory notation to indication of procedural reassessment to stabilizing post-and-lintel, are as central as color or composition to these works. They mediate the sense of scale, compositional tensions, and veils of light in the paintings. They pop in and out, never entirely giving away their reasons for being, yet always pressuring the eye to redefine its route over the visual field. There is so much going on in these paintings that has been perfunctorily obliterated yet remains incontrovertibly present. Diebenkorn said that it was “a great relief to obliterate,”¹⁵ yet these obliterations are less complete erasure and more obfuscation and tinkering. As Robert Buck observed 35 years ago, our experience of Diebenkorn’s “facture is purposefully and prominently retained in the works” allowing us to follow along with “the artist whether the method was finally acceptable to him or not.”¹⁶ The tentativeness of this reappraisal and reconstruction is signaled in the nature of what is left behind on the surface for viewers to excavate.

There are many layers to dig through, as each chromatic sheet, each ruled line, and each dashed-in brush mark has its own nature and particular effect on the overall work. What yellow may do in an interlocking diagonal group or as a swift line is entirely different when it is given over to the service of light-infused planes. A color that neatly subsumes into an area of analogous hue may violently react when, only a few feet away, it intersects with some seemingly innocuous middle tone. Any location in a work seems at the very least binary in nature, taking on a kind of duality: speed and stillness, position and vector, passivity and forcefulness. With Diebenkorn, almost any element can embody seemingly opposing states. In some sense it depends on the facture – how he put the marks down – but it can also be based simply upon the interdependency and indeterminacy of the formal relationships he created. In Ocean Park formal properties play on the provisionality of the audience’s subjective apprehension of the artist’s pursuit of his own rightness. He said as much when he told Gerald Nordland in 1976, “one’s sense of rightness involves absolutely the whole person and hopefully others.”¹⁷

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It is not only that Diebenkorn has constructed a dynamic visual maze for us; it is also that he built temporality into the effort we must expend to perceive the works. This is something we can readily understand – we recognize that the “V” shape in the upper left of #38 is “fast” to our perception. But do we sense the dozen other speeds that he has embedded within the work? What may in a small-scale illustration be read immediately and totally becomes a much harder prospect at full scale, and a much richer one.

The time it takes for us to read certain constellations of elements is a condition of the scale of these works, and it is not accidental. Most of the Ocean Park Series is human scale and their size – many of them are 100 by 81 inches – obviously forces a viewer to calibrate his or her bodily relationship to the work. Because of this the viewer must move to take in the tableau, tracking across a surface that will not allow for smooth, easy travel. Thus the amount of time necessary to physically move around the work – something done not only with the eyes, but also with the head and whole body – varies and is full of starts and stops. Any cohesive structure becomes a pivot point; a firm place from which to read/re-read the work, a place of calibration for the next interpretation. The material information on the surface of the work and the interactions of colors and shapes will, by turns, dictate or suggest different speeds of sighting and different levels of attention, alternating types of focus. All of this maneuvering takes time, both physically and mentally. That temporal aspect in the experience of the works adds weight to the negotiation of the different areas and, as we find more to excavate, more to challenge, we sense that the amount of time we have spent in certain areas adds compositional weight to them; their balance is not based on strictly formal principles.

This temporal quality in the works extends deeply into their making, clouding our ability to grasp clearly the process by which they were made. That is, their surfaces are inscrutable in terms of the order or sequence of their creation. One cannot emphatically state when one layer was placed down in regard to other layers; each layer seems sequentially multivalent. As a matter of course we dissect a work of art as we view it, considering this area part of the under-painting and that element a detail added toward the end. This aids in our processing of the work and enlivens the temporality of the work. Yet when Diebenkorn created each element is a variable unknown to the viewer, so what one may think is on top may suddenly appear distinctly embedded, and vise versa. The order of the layering may be chaotic or simply non-linear, yet we perceive it as an amalgamated whole and only through extended viewing can we try out different potential orderings or viewing strategies. This factor adds to the provisionality of our reading, since any determination we make may pressurize other layers and elements, causing them to move away from our prior assumptions about them and altering the feeling of the whole work.

Therefore, in the Ocean Park Series, formal elements and their interrelationships are as subtractive as they are additive. By this I mean to suggest that they do more than simply accumulate in one manner or toward one particular state. There are multifaceted ends at play in these artworks, more than one solution being simultaneously considered upon their surfaces. It is the overlapping of alternate purposes uniting or interfering with one another that create divergent and potentially unplanned syncopations in the visual field. Ocean Park is indeed more complex than it may appear on the printed page.

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From all of this it seems to me that the mode of painting in the Ocean Park Series is not intellectual or emotional so much as it is kinesthetic. Diebenkorn succeeded in creating zones of reference and incident that allow a viewer to feel out and maneuver through the tensions in much the same ways he may have. He knew that we each inherently read these sorts of dynamic visual forces differently and at vastly different speeds. His provisional manner purposefully encoded, as described above, many varied spatial and temporal effects into the total compositional effect of his paintings. The works become catalysts for the kind of search for rightness that he himself pursued.

His commitment to “tension beneath calm”¹⁸ and “an exciting kind of stillness”¹⁹ in the gestalt experience of his art never removes the astonishment of discovery and sense of reconsideration it stimulates. Though they certainly carry a sense of calmness or stillness, the paintings deny viewers any sense of particular point of view and initiate the plurality of reading that I have suggested above. The Ocean Park works of Richard Diebenkorn “invite the viewer into a moment of intense contemplation without enabling a fixed viewpoint, no Cartesian sense of where artist or viewer is situated in relation to the composition.”²⁰

Thus Diebenkorn’s rightness is not about collapsing possibility or locking in any particular read. Ultimately, that feeling of rightness may only be accessible via a condition of uncertainty rather than of objective facts. Perhaps that is why, at least in Ocean Park, the instinctive stroke of the artist is not a dogmatic assertion but a questioning reformation of what he has already done. There was vulnerability and risk in this methodology; it was a risk of which he was well aware. Yet he stated that he wanted to “hold onto the incidentals” and work with the “kind of tension that would involve a large flex” to create a sense that “potentially, something was about to happen.”²¹ He sought simultaneous “potency and impotency”²² in the work, an approach that kept it constantly open and pressing toward both resolution and beginning. Burying previous strategies and disrupting safe, settled areas in favor of new angles and more tremulous solutions were at least as important to Diebenkorn as was any clear rightness. In some sense, it seems that the only right kind of rightness would be the sort that allowed the incidental and provisional to exist in the formal point and counterpoint of works that could be balanced only by viewing, negotiation, and experience.

It is a remarkable gift to be given the opportunity to see as the artist saw, if not in the specifics, then in the general manner and force of his vision. In the aesthetic economy of Ocean Park, anything may be reworked, each line and edge and color challenged or reasserted. As viewers we participate in the review. We get to be with Diebenkorn in the resolution of the tensions. We follow along in the fussy ease, the relaxed awkwardness, the tentative tautness of the work. We try and retry our own perceptions, testing them, following the artist on “a path of continual new beginnings”²³. In this the work becomes involved with our experience beyond the mere making and display of pictures. It exists as an invitation to negotiate and analyze.

What a reward for deep engagement: that each viewing of an Ocean Park painting may be a fresh aesthetic experience, informed but never eclipsed by those past. Perhaps this explains the popularity and resilience of Richard Diebenkorn’s painting; every time we see them we see them for the first time.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series will travel to the following locations over the coming year:

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
September 25, 2011–January 22, 2012

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
February 26–May 27, 2012

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
June 30–September 23, 2012

Note
I want to thank my student and friend Marcus Miers (http://marcusjmiers.net/) for traveling to Texas with me to see the Diebenkorn show. Our conversations during the trip were an integral contribution to my thinking in this essay; much of the above content is contingent upon his insight and clarity. I’m grateful to him for helping me to honestly reevaluate my understanding of Diebenkorn’s work.

Matthew Ballou is an artist and writer living in Columbia, Missouri with his wife and daughter. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Painting and Drawing at The University of Missouri, where he has taught since 2007. Recently his work has been seen in solo shows in Boston and Seattle, as well as in a two-person show with Tim Lowly in Louisville, KY. Ballou was a Finalist for The Ruminate Visual Art Prize, 2011. His extensive article on the work of Odd Nerdrum was the cover feature in Image Journal’s 2006 Summer Edition. Ballou has been a contributor to Neoteric Art since 2009, and Neoteric released a collection of his essays, titled Nine Texts, in October 2011. (http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Texts-Matthew-Ballou/dp/1105088936)

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Footnotes
¹Meanley, Jennifer. One Day: New Works by Barry Gealt. Indianapolis: Ruschman Gallery, 2008. Print catalog.↩
²Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 22.↩
³Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1st ed. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-252.↩
⁴Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #70. 1974. The Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. Web. http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/images/thumbnail.aspx?img=/webres/Image/photo_gallery/54.jpg↩
⁵Richard Diebenkorn. Interior with a Book. 1959. The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Web. http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/CollectionDatabase.cfm?id=17593&theme=M_C/↩
⁶Rubinstein, Raphael. “Provisional Painting.” Art in America. May 2009: N.p. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/provisional-painting-raphael-rubinstein/.↩
⁷Butler, Sharon. “The New Casualists.” Two Coats of Paint. N.p., 04 06 2011. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/06/new-casualists.html↩
⁸Butler, Sharon. “Abstract Painting: The New Casualists.” The Brooklyn Rail. June 2011. n. page. Web. 18 Jan 2012 http://brooklynrail.org/2011/06/artseen/abstract-painting-the-new-casualists/.↩
⁹Diebenkorn, Richard quoted by Gerald Nordland. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 40.↩
¹⁰Nordland, Gerald. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 34.↩
¹¹Buck, Robert T. “The Ocean Park Paintings.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 46.↩
¹²Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #38. 1971. The Phillips Collection of American Art, Washington, D.C. Web. http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/artwork/Diebenkorn-Ocean_Park_38.htm↩
¹³Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 32.↩
¹⁴Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 22.↩
¹⁵Richard Diebenkorn. Directed by Tom McGuire. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and TVTV, 1977. Videocassette (VHS), 22:40 min.↩
¹⁶Buck, Robert T. “The Ocean Park Paintings.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 46.↩
¹⁷Diebenkorn, Richard quoted by Gerald Nordland. “The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn.” Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976. 1st ed. Buffalo, New York: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976. 41.↩
¹⁸Mills, Paul. Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting. 1st ed. Oakland, California: Oakland Art Museum, 1957. 12.↩
¹⁹Ashton, Dore. “Richard Diebenkorn’s Paintings.” Arts Magazine 46. December 1971-January 1972. 35.↩
²⁰Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 22.↩
²¹Elderfield, John. The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. 1st ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. 54.↩
²²Ibid.↩
²³Bancroft, Sarah C. “A View of Ocean Park.” Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series. 1st ed. New York: DelMonico-Prestel, 2011. 35.↩

I’m sending you my dirty laundry writes Courbet to his parents in 1839. Courbet is only twenty years old, a student at Besançon, and looks like the self-assured young man in this self-portrait (not the larger-than-life painter who once bragged that he drank two bottles of Burgundy, three bottles of Bordeaux, one bottle of local wine, coffee laced with Cognac, followed by dessert, and then threw it all up Roman-style while staying at a friend’s estate in Saintonge). After giving his parents the heads up about the laundry Courbet says that one, he would like his parents to send him more cotton stockings (he doesn’t wear the woolen ones) and that two, he has blood in his stool, but contrary to the hemorrhoid diagnosis of his doctor, he believes he is simply suffering from a case of échauffement, or constipation. One of the reasons I like to read letters of the famous is for details just like these. Wow. Courbet had trouble pinching off a loaf now and then. Just like me.

It isn’t only to find out that the famous are just like us (US magazine’s attempt to assure us that stars’ lives are not that different from ours) that I read letters. Reading the daily bric-a-brac of people’s lives, where Manet bought his shoes before his duel with Duranty, who met Courbet for dinner at the Café Andler; these small curios of information plunge me into their world in a way that a biography cannot do: I feel as if I know them when I finish reading their letters. When Manet complains in a letter to Zachary Astruc that he hasn’t heard from Baudelaire lately, Baudelaire sounds less like the unattainable poet-god on the pedestal where I keep him and more like a guy I might run into in a diner. (I recently found Charles Baudelaire on Facebook and asked him to be my friend; he hasn’t confirmed yet.) And what about the delicious innocence of Manet’s question to his friend Théodore Duret: “Who is this Monet whose name sounds like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?”

Another reason to read letters? You become your own historian. Letters, along with church records, public records, maps, and treatises (to name just a few) constitute the flotsam of primary sources that historians pick up from puddles, lakes, and oceans of conserved, sometimes intentionally (sometimes not) debris. With them a version of a story is patched together to enlighten (or, when used as propaganda, to persuade) an audience. Delving into letters means that you can create your story.

A good example of the slippery nature of building a story occurred when I recently read Manet’s letters. I’ve read several books about Manet and the one I like for sheer readability is Beth Archer Brombert’s Rebel in a Frock Coat. Brombert constructs a tight, solid narrative of Manet’s life and work: saucy stories of the Belle Epoque, penetrating, but not overly academic, analysis of his paintings, investigative ferreting into Manet’s family life, and, like a good tour leader with a bright orange stick waving in the air, Brombert deftly guides us through the labyrinth of 19th century politics; the Empires, Republics, Monarchies, and insurrections.

According to Brombert, Manet endured a loveless marriage with a Dutch woman named Suzanne Leenhoff. Manet, only twenty, got her pregnant while she was working as his music instructor and later married her out of honor (claiming, to save face, that his illegitimate son Léon was in fact Suzanne’s brother). Suzanne was beneath the Manets socially, rather homely, and fairly simple by all accounts. Berthe Morisot nicknamed her “la grosse Suzanne” – “fat Susan”. Brombert points out that Manet stayed married and led the kind of life the haute bougeoisie demanded of him; in the book there is no reference to love or tenderness between the two.

Enter primary sources! While reading Manet’s letters during the Franco-Prussian war (Manet stayed in the capital as a volunteer and sent his family south for safety) one can’t help but notice that Manet wrote to Suzanne practically everyday and not just to say “Wassup, fat Susan”? Here are a few samples that were delivered by hot air balloons and pigeons from the besieged capital:

October 23, 1870: I spent a long time, my dear Suzanne, looking for your photograph – I eventually found the album in the table in the drawing room, so I can look at your comforting face from time to time. I woke up last night thinking I heard you calling me…

November 23, 1870: Goodbye my dear Suzanne, I embrace you lovingly and would give Alsace and Lorraine to be with you.

December 23, 1870: Goodbye my dear Suzanne, your portraits are hanging in every corner of the bedroom, so I see you first and last thing…

And so on and so on.

Brombert does mention the letters. She says that earlier biographies (citing one from 1947 by Adolphe Tabarant) used the letters to intimate “a vague picture of domestic bliss” and that “no attention has been paid to the probable dissatisfactions of both spouses.” Brombert read all the letters, but combined with other documentation and research, put together a new version of the Manet/Suzanne relationship, one based on her own reading of primary sources (a reading which is in all probability closer to reality than Tabarant’s “vague picture of domestic bliss”).

Reading other people’s letters is not for everyone. I’m still reading Courbet’s (632 pages and causing me a bit of tendonitis in my right arm from holding it upright in bed). My husband winces when he sees me reading them; he is appalled by my lack of discretion. He’s right in a way: pinching a letter from a postman’s cart is a criminal offense and reading someone else’s mail (such as when a friend of mine and I steamed upon an envelope addressed to her mother from her estranged father and then resealed it) is dishonest, disrespectful, and downright wrong. Yet, when someone famous dies letters become a free-for-all: the desk drawers are opened, spilled out, and we get to rummage through.

Luc Sante, writing about the recent publication of Susan Sontag’s journals (Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963) says that “the complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author’s desk drawer is [...] to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit”. Ah, another post-modern dilemma, and it may be true for modern writers: French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault famously burned and destroyed every shred of personal writing before he died. Sante’s statement implies that in the end we only read what the foresighted author wanted us to read. Will all published letters begin then to fall into the self-aware, post-modern complicity that Sante writes about?

As for me, give me the age of innocence and the “voyeuristic thrill” I have when I read about bloody stool, passion (or lack of it), and dirty laundry. In a letter dated August 23, 1865, Manet writes to his friend Zacharie Astruc: “I should be going with Champfleury and Stevens, but they keep putting it off. Anyway, they are bloody bores. Excuse the unseeming language, but since my letter is not for publication, I can say what I please.” Touché.

Resources:
Manet by himself, edited by Juliette Bareau-Wilson
Letters of Gustave Courbet, edited by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu
The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau : “The discourse designed to make the other speak remains the speaker’s discourse and the mirror of his undertaking.” – “Le discours destiné à dire l’autre reste son discours et le miroir de son opération.”

A few years ago I was browsing in my favorite used book shop when I came upon an English edition of Charles Blanc’s Grammaire Des Arts Du Dessin by Kate Doggett. She published this translation in Chicago in 1879 as Grammar of Painting and Engraving. I immediately bought the book because I already knew a little of Charles Blanc, the French art critic and one-time Director of the Ecole Des Beaux-arts. His Grammar had influenced George Seurat, particularly in its treatment and diagrams of color theory and the optical effects of simultaneous contrast which led Seurat to his method of neoimpressionism. Not until I read the book, however, did I learn how thoroughly Blanc presented the idealized principles of the Beaux-arts Style and how great his influence was in those crucial years when the Beaux-arts tradition was being displaced by modernism.

While Blanc’s Grammar is a guide to basic principles, a kind of handbook of method for the artist, it is also a polemic of aesthetics based on Platonic ideal forms and types. The heart of this view is the idea of an eternal, perfect prototype for each class of things in nature; that is, typical, general forms to be imagined as the flawless molds of things that in nature are flawed, lesser, imperfect, individualized. The goal of the painter, for Blanc, is to imitate the ideal prototype, not nature itself. Blanc wants the painter to recognize that only through generalizing nature, seeking a type and not an individual, can one achieve what he termed Style, the imitation of the ideal prototype. Blanc refers to masters to illustrate his teaching: DaVinci, Raphael, Rembrandt. He turns to their preparatory sketches as examples of individualized life studies that are then redrawn to eliminate details and flaws of nature to instead reveal the general, the balanced, the universal: Style.

Underlying or fused with this quest for the ideal or Style is Blanc’s insistence on the moral. For him, and thus for the Beaux-arts painter, the means of imitation leads to the ends of expression of a spiritual ideal or template of that which supersedes nature and must be invented by the painter and is therefore an expression of the moral, or the true good.

It is interesting that Blanc does not limit the moral in art to subject or narrative but to formal method. He does not say that some depictions are necessarily more moral than others simply because of their subject matter or any didactic function a painting may serve. He embeds the moral in the formal properties of art, in line, balance, light-dark, color, and most of all in unity, because these are the means by which an expression of ideal form can be achieved. However, Blanc does allow for genre painting aimed at realistic imitation of nature instead of Style. For instance a genre painting of a domestic scene may emphasize — and carefully imitate the natural peculiarities of individuals and their environment for the sake of charm alone and thus eschew the higher aim of Style as a formal idealization. For such genre painting Blanc seems to imply that the moral is irrelevant because imitation of nature as it is does not involve Style.

The fusion of the moral with the formal principles of the Beaux-arts Style is all but forgotten today. Now we think of the Beaux-arts tradition as encompassing a set of conventions that fell into decay and redundancy during the rise of modernism. We don’t associate the moral with modernism. If the Beaux-arts sensibility of the moral was the expression of a universal ideal or type that lay beyond the reality of nature and is attained by formal idealization, the modernist sensibility replaced the idea of the moral with the idea of utopia which is best imagined as a social condition imitated in art and not as a spiritual aspiration. Yet the distinction is fuzzy. Even Blanc argued that the attainment of Style, or the ideal, could “…by its dignity, elevate the souls of men and nations…and reform the manners of men by its visible lessons.” Later, Mondrian had the same ambition for neo-plasticism. What of Rothko and Newman in this respect? And others?

Although Blanc presumed that the human figure is the essential subject in art, his Grammar really transforms the figure into a set of abstract formal principles. He might just as well have been writing about rectangles and circles and in fact he did place geometry as the fundamental means by which the general can be induced from the particular. The point is that he saw those principles as moral in their capacity to elevate the human soul.

Today, in the context of advanced abstract painting, it’s considered largely foolish to speak of utopian art. In the face of a disintegrating globalism, utopian ideas are pinched and quaint. Moreover, it is certainly taboo, I believe, to speak of a moral abstract painting Paradoxically, however, the modernist tradition of formalist abstract painting continues unabated into its postmodern phase, reshuffling earlier iterations, adding and subtracting whatever is deemed peculiar to painting and its processes, no longer aiming for something that used to be called the moral or the utopian or even the spiritual — and now dares not try — veering instead to the ironic, the sardonic, the literal, and the individualized. It employs the means of Blanc’s Beaux-arts Style but strays to other ends because the implication of expressing the moral is anathema in today’s secular art-world. After all, the revolutionary nature of modernism required amoral, secular boundlessness.

It is ludicrous to entertain the idea that there is indeed something that is off-limits in contemporary abstract painting. After a century and more of breaking down rules, presumptions and traditions of art, any informed painter is alert to the notion that nothing falls beyond the pale, nothing is taboo in painting — except, as I now believe, the moral, the very essence of Blanc’s formalist Style. The moral is excluded essence of contemporary abstract painting.

By about 1910, the notion of the moral had already disappeared from modernist art theory yet the formal principles remained and were given a new role as not only the structure of painting but also its subject. In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky’s essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art proclaimed inner necessity as the fundamental source for artistic creation. Although inner necessity is separate from any formal principles it is an a-priori spiritual condition enabling the artist to employ formal elements somehow infused with that spirituality. We can’t know what Kandinsky’s spiritual inner necessity is except by feeling it in beholding the formal elements in art, expressed intuitively and independently of referenced subject matter. Inner necessity is a surrogate term for Blanc’s notion of the moral except that for Kandinsky it is purely subjective, and for Blanc the moral is objective; that is, something inscribed by the rules and principles of formal Style. Much closer to Blanc’s notion of the moral is Clive Bell’s essay on Significant Form, published in 1914. Bell claims that what makes something art is not subject matter or even content (its theme) but simply the right arrangement of form. In this he agrees with Blanc but unlike Blanc he gives no rules or formal principles and no method for achieving significant form. For Bell, significant form exists objectively as a unity of formal elements but must, like Kandinsky’s inner necessity, be apprehended subjectively and unlike Blanc, it follows no rule.

Both Kandinsky’s inner necessity and Bell?s significant form, in various mixes, are the basic conceptual contexts for modernist and postmodernist abstract painting. Both allude to Blanc’s insistence that the formal principles of art, however they are described, embody a moral dimension, but in a wavering way, indecisively, and ultimately inverting it to amoral indifference. Inner necessity and significant form don’t deliver what they inherently promise, the moral. Without the moral content formalism becomes arbitrary. Any impulse can be claimed for any expression of any so-called inner necessity. What expression does not begin as inner? Further, any configuration of form can be claimed as significant. After all, without Blanc’s rather specific prescriptions for achieving the general and ideal, there is no way to discover insignificant form, let alone significant form. Here, then is the ultimate paradox, contradiction, and crisis in contemporary abstract painting. How can it persist in using the formal principles of art as the necessary and sufficient means by which aesthetic expression is possible while at the same time denying the intrinsic moral nature of those principles?

Is it time to reexamine what is moral in abstract painting and in all serious art? To do so would mean to abandon the redundancy of irony and to overcome the one substantial taboo in contemporary art: The taboo against the moral. It would not require a return to Blanc’s Beaux-arts Style but it might lead to a radical new use of Blanc’s ideas.

Bibliographic References:

Bell, C. 1969. The Aesthetic Hypothesis. In Tillman, F., Mc Cahn, S., (Eds.), philosophy of Art from Plato to Wittgenstein, Harper & Row, New York, NY. pp 415-428, 1910.

Doggett, Kate N., The Grammar of Painting and Engraving: Translated From The French of Blanc?s Grammaire DesArts DU Dessin, S.C. Griggs and Company, Chicago, 1879.

Kandinsky, W., 1957, Concerning The Spiritual in Art, G. Wittenborn, Inc., New York, NY, 1912.

About William Conger
William Conger lives and works in Chicago. His 2009 retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center chronicled a fifty-year career, with more recent paintings such as “Bandit” and “The Parkway Series” leading the way toward future visions. His work can be found in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Oregon’s Portland Museum, and the Wichita Art Museum – to name a few.

Exclusively for Neoteric Art. ©William Conger, 2011
www.williamconger.com

Foreword

In the summer of 2011 I began a lengthy email conversation with my main professor from graduate school, Barry Gealt. Barry is someone who’s continued to have authority to challenge me and I have always valued what I’ve learned from him; he’s been at least as influential to me since grad school as he was during it. Getting an email from him is always an invitation to think about things – life, art, or meaning – from a perspective I hadn’t been considering.

In the course of our summer email repartee, Barry suggested that I evaluate – or reevaluate, as the case might be – what the weight on my artistic shoulders is. What are the things that motivate me? What pushes me out of my comfort zones? What challenges me to do something more, or something different, in my work? What moves me beyond my assumptions?

These are all important questions. They’re certainly necessary to those of us who’ve made a life of art, but they’re also part and parcel of what it means to be a reflective human being. So I decided to sit down and try to enumerate for Barry what my “weights” are right now and how I’m thinking about them. By way of calibration: know that Barry and I had been talking about illustration as a particular avenue of image making, as well as the place of belief or spiritual motivation in the life of the artist. This is why these issues feature prominently in my “weights.”

My Weights, for Barry

As an artist I am not interested in argumentation about belief or proving anything about religion or spirituality. My work is really more about paying attention to evocative, relational experiences and making images that relate to those experiences.

To me, all artworks are simply artifacts of an individual having a focused, aware experience of being – what Gaston Bachelard called “the astonishment of being”. Think of it this way: An individual has an intense experience in the context of living that creates a sense of fullness, meaning, and direction. The artist is constrained by this experience and becomes pressurized to respond to it. There is an ebb and flow to this call and response, but it is a constant state for those of us who think like artists. An artwork is the overflow of the artist’s evocative experiences. It is an expression of the artist’s experience of being as filtered through his or her proclivities, influences, and frame of reference. Artworks are not merely pretty pictures or didactic declarations of information; works that fall into these categories fall short of the promise and purpose of art. The purpose of art is to translate an evocative experience of being and initiate/stimulate contemplative engagement in others who are willing to have it.

Artworks are reflexive, subjective expressions that proceed from our engagement with reality, whatever that engagement might be. The works become transmundane, evocative things that – when we actually submit to their influences – may function as relational conduits for us as an audience to sense and become more aware of being.

So I wouldn’t say that I’m a religious artist or that I’m trying to make declaratively spiritual pictures. It’s just that I think that everything is enchanted and that even the most banal subject matter can be made worthy of contemplation through contemplation and deep engagement.

Looking at artists like Titian or Guido Reni or Bellini or Tiepolo you can see that yes, the subject matter might be religious but the image is about being. Many of the images these artists made show true, deep, human engagement that goes far beyond merely expressing biblical doctrine or a mythological morality play. These works transcend the local meaning of the religious moment for which the image was made because the artist sensed deep currents of evocative life and worked from them.

Pontormo’s Deposition is perhaps the greatest example of this mode of artistic creation. It’s a consummately religious work with much to say theologically. But it transcends the situational “holiness” of its use and takes on a deeply evocative human meaning because of how it was made and how it has functioned over time. The spiritual context of his society certainly influenced Pontormo and was part of the reason why he made the work, yes. But his ability to take the image beyond doctrine – beyond information-transfer, beyond illustration, beyond proselytizing or argumentation – is related to how humane and sensitive his eye and mind were, both to the human condition and the formal concerns of crafting images.

It’s easy to spot artists who merely executed religious images from those, like Donatello, who lived and made images from life. His Magdalene isn’t the product of religiosity; it’s the product of humanity. The works I’m describing are not about converting people, but showing the witness of transformation that’s already in our world.

That’s what I want to do. If that’s religious, so be it, but I don’t see it as such. There isn’t a circumscribed area of “religious” and other areas that aren’t for me. All of life is sacred and enchanted for me. Everything is subjective and contingent.

All of the above determines the weights that I feel:

1) The weight of how objects resonate with our experience.
a. Meaning comes to inhabit objects through our use and experience of them over time. Because of this they become important and worth contemplating in artworks.
2) The weight of how the body resonates with our experience.
a. The inherent value and wonder of our embodiment is key to our experience of reality, key to our understanding of aesthetics and formal concerns, and key to our notions of meaning.
3) The weight of form as image.
a. Form as image is really just constructive visual logic in the context of compositional visual dynamics, formal relationships, and chromatic environments. It is a key to how we understand reality.
4) The weight of the difference between poetic (intersubjective, evocative) understanding and rational (empirical, “objective”) understanding.
a. The perennial dualities that seem to divide our experience of the world are heavy; each side tries to be definitive, but neither can exist without the other:
i. Faith / Logic
ii. Belief / Reason
iii. Intuition / Analysis
iv. Metaphysical / Physical
v. Supernatural / Natural
vi. Mystical / Rational
b. The rational / technical is more specific, directed, and closed. It lends itself to illustration and argument.
c. The emotional / allegorical is specific, directed, and transitional, which is why it can bridge the gap between illustration, iconography, and poetic images.
d. The poetic / archetypal is more general and open, trying to evoke a kind of multifaceted approach to meaning and understanding.
5) Weight of the differences between illustrative, iconographic, and poetic images.
a. Illustration: a directed one-to-one relationship between the picture and meaning.
b. Iconography: a more resonant and generalized one-to-one relationship between picture and meaning.
c. Poetic: an open and relational evocation of meaning via the picture.

But how does all of that play out in specific images? What it means is that I try to create images that work like relational conduits (something that simulates relationship, contemplation, and generosity of spirit). I want viewers to experience an invitation to contemplate their experiences in a dynamic, evocative way. This means that I can’t close down the read too much. It means that I can’t have too much of an agenda, though all of my history and influences and forebears (like you) are going to be shining through and inflecting what I do. It means that I have to try to maintain an open voice while advocating for the things I believe and am motivated by. I may fail at this from time to time, because I am so interested in the tension between illustrative, iconographic, and poetic images. I want to try to push illustration out of telling and facts and into evocative contemplation. It’s a hard task.

Most of the time illustration merely tells, merely declares something known. But good artworks remind us of something just beyond the edge of our knowing. They evoke a sense of what we intuitively feel about life: that there is something inherently meaningful and worthy about who we are and what we are doing, contemplating, living with, and aiming toward. Our dignity and the wonder of our consciousness can’t be reduced to certainty and facts; we know that we’re more than the sum of our parts. We know that what we are can’t be reduced down to the chemistry of our brains. We sense that we are more indefinable than definable.

The distinction between telling/declaring and evoking/reminding is very important to me. Telling and declaring only work in the context of certain kinds of truth. However, as Lucian Freud said, “There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.” Truth does more than strike one as merely being true. Truth is more than the transmission of facts. It lifts you and causes you to resonate with awareness of your own contingency and limitation, your own beingness and consciousness. That’s why religious works meant to convey religious dogma are boring to me: they’re not true enough, not about life enough.

That’s why the Pontormo and Donatello I mentioned above work so well; they connect with life in a way that rings true. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what the weight on my shoulders is. What burdens are you carrying?

Top: Matthew Ballou, Condition, multiple layer monotype in oil on paper, 2005

The ways that the human mind manifests itself in creative activity are vast and various. People have theorized about and argued over modes of creative impetus for millennia. Artists and lovers of art are constantly attempting to plumb these depths, always looking for some elucidation of the mechanisms and maneuvers our minds utilize when we are in that universally recognized but seemingly undefined state that is creation. There have been a great many different opinions and certainly a large proliferation of words used to describe this state, this modality of thought. What follows here is a brief attempt to perceive a strategy for understanding the broadest creative modes of the mind.

These creative modes could be distilled to two mental states: intuition and analysis. I believe that creative activity really amounts to the dynamic interaction between these two forms of understanding.

Consider intuition first. When people talk about their artistic processes with statements such as, “I just surrender to the work,” “I empty myself and let it flow,” or “I turn off my mind,” they are speaking of acting from intuition. They are moved by an instinctive, largely unexamined series of unspoken conditions, assumptions, and motivations. To describe all of this as intuitive is not to suggest that it is illogical, irrational, or arbitrary. Rather, the intuitive is built from a whole range of varied interactions with reality, all of which are grounded in real experience and practical knowledge. The substance of our intuition is, as I will discuss below, partly made up of what we know about the world through overt cognitive engagement: education, reading, studying, and thinking. Yet it is also built from physically being in the world: experiences we have with our bodies, technical skills we have built over time through multiple attempts, and the ability our minds have to identify with the physical, emotional, and intellectual realities of other human beings. The content of our intuition is basically the sum total of our mental, emotional, and physical experience of the world that forms an instinctive frame of reference for us. What we know and how we experience that knowingness coalesce into an inner sense of rightness and direction.

I can witness this time and time again while creating my own paintings, drawings, or prints. As I take creative action in the world, my background frame of reference – my intuition – flows out of its own accord. Even with extremely precise and specific efforts, the weight of what I know constantly informs my conscious mind in multifaceted ways that are not the overt recitation of techniques or formulae but instead are a meta-filtered pre-cognitive sense of how I should move or not move in any given situation. I cannot escape my intuition, but I can seek to use it or to constrain it. I can work to be aware of it or find ways to ignore its presence.

The results of this synergy between more or less conscious action and embedded, unconscious or instinctive stimuli are not necessarily objective, nor are they always entirely appropriate at first blush. However, they can be honed over time into greater and greater accuracy, or at least into more applicable and necessary avenues of implementation. How I use that vast data enclosed in my intuitive frame of reference, how I add to it, how I shape it is, in large part an effect of just being in the world.

Because it is intuitive, it directly follows that I am not overtly deciphering what I am doing while I am doing it but rather am going with the flow, responding in a kinesthetic way to my environment, to the task at hand, to the formal physical or visual dynamics at play. There is a real sense in which the practical value of the intuitive is located outside of the mind (i.e. in the realm of actions) but is directly related to what the mind has previously processed through thoughts or experiences. The more I use it, the more it can shape my actions, and thus, circling back into itself, the more it is refined and referential to my own particular encounters with reality. In stepping back and considering what intuition has wrought I can gain a greater grasp on what I am doing, what I want, and how to get there. This mental state of stepping back from active making in order to take stock of what that making has done is, obviously, analysis.

The analytical property is the cognitive process of considering what has been created, known, or formulated and investigating it in the light of other available information. Though it is a different function of the creative mind, analysis is no less valid or valuable than the intuitive function. It is, perhaps, Kant’s notion of disinterested judgment at work. It amounts to a studied, learned grasp of a field. It is a rational, thoughtful application of relevant information to the question at hand. It is a knowing trajectory of thought meant to bring context and history into perspective and apply them to a specific situation. Analysis is the conscious, rigorous assessment of what the intuitive has conjured up. It brings in the weight of external meanings and conceptualizations, allowing outside history, methods, and meanings to become a foil to the internal, personal movements of intuition.

Like intuition, analysis is also accumulated and honed. Like intuition, analysis must be utilized in order to grow and become more useful and far-reaching. Like intuition, we carry analysis with us; it is in our frame of reference, and the information it calls us to consider is later absorbed into the unconscious bedrock of our intuition. This is a special point – that the analytical may be subsumed into the body of the intuitive. Any instruction in art (or any other subject) that I have received, every page of theory read, all of the critiques I have had (or have given), every passionate argument made or heard were, in their moments of happening, analytical by nature. Yet afterward the experience of dense intellectual assessment passed from my outward regard and became a part of the matrix of my deeper understanding. Each book read, every museum explored, all lectures intensely considered, every struggle to mix the perfect color… all of these things eventually add their value to the ocean of meaning and pre-cognitive understanding that is intuition. There is an infinite return at play here, as these elements become part of the underlying depths that constitute the intuitive. What was once outside of me, part of the external context, has now become part of the inflection of my innermost creative movements, and it may – in ways I can never entirely know or fully understand – be re-manifested into the world through my intuition. This is a glorious, necessary thing.

Analysis is absolutely essential to whole process of art, because it brings a multifaceted framework to bear on the singular viewpoint of an individual creative action. Analysis is the re-contextualization of information, action, and instinct that had been de-contextualized in the unconscious databank of the individual mind. It once had context, but, after being learned and practiced, it passed into the intuition where it was sublimated into dense interwoven strands of subjectivity, ready to be called forth in various ways. This calling forth in a creative action is usually automatic and un-parsed; we normally do not examine every single brushstroke or every line of a composition in the moment of its initial appearance. Therefore, in the moment of its presentation, any element may seem to be context-less (“I just did it. It’s not based on anything,” etc). We know this not to be the case, since all things were presented to us within a context, all learning occurs in some format, and all actions take place within a broader referential tableau. It is impossible to make a pure or random or context-less expression. Analysis heightens our sense of the surrounding context within which our expressions move.

Analysis could then be understood as a conscious awareness of the broader perspective within which our unconscious, instinctive actions have taken place. Intuition is built from the absorption of analytical information, and analysis of intuitive action forms the basis for understanding deeper pre-cognitive, instinctive motivation and direction. Using what we learn from this process feeds back into the process, progressively shaping the contours of our intuitive abilities and enhancing the precision of our apprehension of what we mean in our instinctive creative action. There is balance here. It is a wonderful symmetry, a tightrope dance between the poetic and the rational, between faith and logic, between the sensate and the intellectual.

Unfortunately, analysis is something that creative people often fear, denigrate, or ignore. There are many reasons for this. One of them is fear of the feeling inadequate in the face of intellectual or philosophical rigor. Some artists fear that disenchantment – and a resulting inability to create – might come from too much definition or explanation. Another fear is related to the emotional vulnerability that analysis creates. Ultimately, people fear being attacked for their expressions. This is, of course, because analysis is a deeply challenging event, in the sense that critique or scholarship forces creators to step away from their emotional association with the work in order to gain a different, broader, nuanced understanding of it. Because of their close connection to the work they make, artists necessarily feel the uncomfortable, prying, revealing force of analysis when it is brought to bear on their work.

Along these lines, there is a huge amount of distrust of analysis by creative people who are in school, particularly graduate school. Often those who reach this level have gotten there purely on intuitive making. They fake the analytical element or compartmentalize it, seeing it as irrelevant to the way they work. This is something I have encountered many times at the university level. When students are pressured to bring the analytical aspect into their work they revolt, feeling that it would demystify their process, destroy the enigma of their ideas and normalize the effect of their work, causing its scope to vastly diminish. Without fail, these fears are baseless, because the feelings of embarrassment and vulnerability brought by true analysis pay off with an infinite range of possibility being added to the work. Suddenly it has access to a real basis, an actual pedigree, a huge arena of resonance, and a claim to an artistic legacy – more than they could have possibly imagined and far more than their own closed-minded perspective could have given them.

There is a strange duality working in the tensions artists feel about deeply examining their own artworks. In many ways we are conditioned to keep our inner beliefs to ourselves, to proscribe our expression of our most fundamental convictions. Yet simultaneously there is a premium placed on self-expression in art, as if it requires no justification whatsoever. Into this realm come intuition and analysis. The intuitive – obviously informed by personal feeling and inner dialogue about what is important and valuable – is revealed by analysis. That is, the analytical approach exists as an explicatory function of critical thought, and it forces inner beliefs and convictions into the light of open discussion. This is often a confrontational, stress-filled situation for all involved, and artists sometimes learn to associate analysis with distress, confusion, misunderstanding, and emotional trauma. Instead of a growing grasp of the potentiality of the work, a more whole understanding of how it operates and how it may be received, they experience a collapse of what limited power the work initially did contain. This need not be the case. What many artists learn through the difficult process of having analysis brought into their world is that, while the intuitive is a door of access to all of human consciousness, analysis is the key that opens that door. Each needs the other; they are conjoined.

In conclusion, and in the interest of further clarity, let me express some thoughts on the symmetrical characteristics of intuition and analysis:
• Intuition moves us deeply but provides no overt justification of these moves.
• Analysis helps us see what our moves share with the history of other moves.
• Intuition tells us what to make.
• Analysis tells us how to understand what we make.
• Intuition forces us to make expressions without qualification.
• Analysis helps us discern the qualification of our expression.
• Intuition is the friend of the individual, the poetic, and the particular.
• Analysis is the friend of the viewer, the rational, the universal, and the contextual.
• Intuition is a monarchy.
• Analysis is a democracy.
• Intuition is passion and reaction.
• Analysis is thoughtfulness and reflection.
• Intuition cares about preserving individual subjectivity.
• Analysis cares about establishing contextual appropriateness.

I hope from this brief listing of contrasts and exploration of intuition and analysis that it is apparent how desperately artists need both of these modes to be active parts of the creative process. Intuition, almost involuntarily, guides the direction and flow of our working (the facture of our paint handling, the style of our prose, the legibility of our handwriting, etc). Analysis helps us shape those intuitive elements into a broader scope and a more nuanced application than our automatic action might make. Analysis helps me inform my intuition, causing my art to better serve its own ends. It helps bring balance to the process. It helps bring a light of understanding to the cloudy depths of inference and implication. In striving to keep intuition and analysis in dynamic tension, by valuing what each brings to the overall artistic situation, and by growing in our appreciation of each, we are able to maintain a perspective that gives us greater sense of what is actually going on in the mysterious process of creation.

“White” was originally published January 16, 2009 on vschneider.wordpress.com

Two days ago at a press conference in Millennium Park, Mayor Daley warned residents about this week’s dangerously cold temperatures while at the same time announcing a new campaign to attract tourists from around the world to Chicago in the winter. In his cavalier way, Mayor Daley mocked the media for sounding the alarm every time it snowed: “We’ve had snow, I mean, we’ve always had ice.” (Imagine with the inimitable Chicago accent.) Yes, we’ve always had it, I tolerate it (badly), but if he thinks a gaggle of Australians are going to leave their summer behind to experience mounds of snow, sheets of ice falling from buildings, temperatures below zero, and, when it all starts to melt, slush and muck so deep you could lose a baby in it, well, I think he is in for a bit of a disappointment.

I’m already sick of winter and it has only just begun. I’m tired of the cold, fed up with the snow, and sick of well-meaning people telling me “how pretty it is”. Aesthetically speaking, I’m sick of the color white. On sunless days white has a hegemonic dominance over the landscape. Looking at the cottony blur in the morning makes me feel as if I’m in a continual process of coming out of anaesthesia, clarity always a bit beyond my reach. Besides, isn’t it unsettling, almost unnatural, when the bottom of the landscape matches the top? Just ask any sailor.

White might symbolize innocence and purity for some but in India women wear white saris when their husbands die. White doesn’t fare much better in Moby Dick. In the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale Melville writes, “…it is, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that ere is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” For Melville, white is absence (“dumb blankness”) and it is precisely this which makes it so full of meaning: it is the ultimate fear, the fear of nothingness; it is the great, white leviathan that drags the crew into the vortex of non-being.

In his short essay Black or White, American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell doesn’t go into the symbolic powers of white (though he does mention Melville), but he’s pretty blunt about the chemical properties of the respective pigments black and white. Black, he writes, being made of soot, is “light and fluffy” whereas whites are either “cold” and “slimy” (zinc oxide) or “extremely poisonous on contact of the body” (lead). ‘Nuf said.

White is also a real stickler for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: at least half his comments in Remarks on Colour focus on white as a problematic concept. The crux of the conundrum is that white is the only color that doesn’t have an opaque and transparent version. Think about it: grass is opaque green, old Coke bottles are transparent green. An apple is opaque red, a red piece of stained glass is transparent. One can even imagine transparent black, though when a sheet of white paper is put behind it, it appears dark grey (which poses yet another problem according to Wittgenstein, for white dilutes other colors but cannot itself be diluted). All this brings Wittgenstein to postulate: if milk is opaque white then doesn’t it follow that water is transparent white?

Chicagoans know all too well what happens when our white, opaque stuff begins to turn into (white) transparent stuff: first it gets speckled with exhaust, then the large, grey mounds melt, which produces a flow (not very transparent) of water, dirt, spit, and grease, all of which ends up in a water treatment facility somewhere. Which brings me, oddly, to the beautiful painting by Gerhard Richter called Ice 1, one of three in a series at the Art Institute of Chicago. Richter takes on the colors of our cold, drab winter and turns them into three amazing paintings of ice; ice out of which seeps infinite and at times almost imperceptible variations of color and texture. Imagine one of our whitish-grey mounds of plowed snow lit up from the inside and embedded within it tiny particles of color: at first glance it looks like ice, upon closer inspection the whole thing is pulsating with color. Now that might (just might) bring the tourists here in January.

Remarks on Colour, Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of California Press
The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press
The Daily Practice of Painting, Gerhard Richter, The MIT Press
Gerhard Richter’s notes are so honest, deep, and poetic that I have an inkling to do a “best of” post with some of his quotes and paintings. Read this book!