Notes From Two Days in New York City
The Serendipity of Frank Stella or A Day in Chelsea
“There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting.” -Frank Stella
If we just deleted everything else he ever said or wrote and took these two short sentences as his only utterances on his work, both the work and all of us who’ve ever had to or wanted to look at it might be better off…
It doesn’t matter if it is the first black “structure” painting from 1958, a protractor, a french curve, or a cast and welded aluminum and fiberglass monstrosity… they are all about the same thing: Painting is and will always remain flat. Looking at his paintings is like looking at a massive wall, you can climb around its service, maybe peek into its crevices, but you’ll never get inside of it. Sometimes you willfully repel back from the wall he has constructed, other times the wall itself flings you back into the ‘real space’ of the world. And this inherent flatness, this lack of depth is what painting is to Mr.Stella [although most others, including Stella himself probably would disagree with me on this…but this is how I see him resolving that first problem. The second problem he resolved by exploring the whole range of abstract painting through the application of his thesis: painting is and will always remain flat. That is the truth. All depth is illusion if it is explored through painting.
At the far end of the exhibition floor were some unpainted recent cast and welded aluminum works. I did not read the wall text beyond his quotes, but I am assuming these are unfitted works and are intended to be painted someday. Despite being massive, 3D structures they all ‘read’ as raw canvas. I thought of how David Smith was playing around with painting some of his sculptures before he died. It is ironic that those works, definitely sculptures that are painted are so physically ‘flat’ compared to Stella’s massive, cast aluminum ‘canvases’. Smith painted sculptures…Stella sculpts paintings. Smith painted sculptures have depth, occupy space. Stella’s most recent works while certainly filling space do not occupy it. They have no depth. Yet both Smith and Stella embrace the ‘truth’ of their particular form of art in their work. The paint on Smith’s sculptures cannot destroy their essence as three dimensional structures anymore than the sculpted canvases of Stella can bring a non-illusional dimensionality to his paintings.
In the paintings from the late 1970s-early 1980s where he began drawing with oil stick, applying paint in an impasto ‘painterly’ manner, using stains, etching into the metal, allowing industrial markings to ‘shine through’ the paint, this is the start of what in ‘At Sainte Luce!’ would become a surface that while appearing to be thick layers of paint, brushed on to each other, built up thickly over times…but are in reality, upon closer examination, nothing more than the marks cast into the aluminum by the artist to create the illusion of a material depth. And because we are confronted with this bold face lie, we know that the ‘truth’ is that our belief in this material depth is nothing more than illusion…or delusion?
Towards the end of my wanderings to and fro through the exhibition I asked myself “Do I ‘like’ Stella’s paintings? Have I ever ‘liked’ Stella’s paintings?” By ‘like’ I mean have I ever found them aesthetically pleasing or aesthetically interesting? The answer to all of these is “No.” However, despite not ‘liking’ them, not finding any connection to the work aesthetically I do have great respect for the work and what Stella has done in his attempts to resolve those two problems with painting as he has seen them to be over the past [almost] sixty years. Going back to what I wrote at the beginning, perhaps if he had only uttered those two short sentences…written less, the paintings would have been able to speak more.
I began to think of all the work that doesn’t ‘speak’ to me in the way Stella wants his paintings to speak to the viewer. Some paintings have nothing to say beyond the aesthetic pleasure they impart…Stella paints the opposite of these paintings. Another example of a painter I would put in this category with Stella who currently has an exhibition on view at Petzel is Corinne Wasmuht. There is a clear conceptual message she is putting out through the paintings, and technically, materially they embody this concept. But I find them neither aesthetically pleasing or interesting beyond how they address that conceptual component.
Then there is so much work that does provide me with an aesthetically pleasurable experience, and does contain a ‘conceptual’ component, but what that might be in particular is of lesser importance to the pleasure of looking. Two examples of this which I saw today were The Early Drawings, 1981-1984, of Donald Baechlor at Cheim & Reid, Virginia Martinsen at Mike Weiss Gallery, and the new paintings from Brice Marden [along with some prints from the early 1970s which hark back to ideas he is again addressing in the new work] at Matthew Marks. Whereas Stella’s space remains that flat and non-penetrable wall, both these artist create an illusional space that one can fall into, float around, and get lost in. It is clearly an illusional space, just like Stella’s, but it an illusional space which allows the viewer to indulge herself in the pleasure of her delusions. Even in the colored squares painted atop the paint dripping coated rectangles Marden creates through color, through the materiality of the layers of paint…none of it impasto, strictly thin washes and glazes…a space one can fall into, like a clear sky, a pool of water, or a pile of fresh snow.
I found it interesting to think how both Stella and Marden have embraced the truth of the flatness of painting. Both acknowledge this truth yet explore and state the truth in completely opposite ways. However it would be false to say that Marden is not indebted to Stella for first asking the question, he does precede him and without Frank Stella there might not be the Brice Marden we know today. The point of rupture between the two painters is the edge of the canvas. Whereas for Stella the only solution for Stella to resolving that second problem was through the destruction of the canvas’ edge, Marden approached it by strengthening the edge, making the viewer more aware of it’s constraining qualities by sending the focus into that illusional/delusional space. The dancing lines fight the edge, but they cannot break through it; their only recourse is to sink further down into the layers of washes and glazes on the canvas, into that illusional space. Delusional? Yes, but in the end that is for me a much nicer space to occupy than the repelling surface of an impenetrable wall.
Finding the inroad along Fifth Avenue
I, like most people, find myself more often than not stymied by the magnitude of my desires. This magnitude is not the desire itself, but the crevice between the desire on one side and the side which is the reality upon which I stand. It is going to require almost a quantum leap to get from the side I’m on to the side where I want to be. If I were a superhero with jet-engine boots I could bound fearlessly into the air directly from the edge and land safely on the other side.
But I’m no superhero.
I’m a painter.
The leap over the crevice and into the void where my desire resides is not taken through the force of rocket-powered boots jettisoning one up and over. It is a leap begun by staring down into the crevice, pondering its depths, gazing across it and into the void where the essence of our desire floats; a mysterious mist like the cartoon drawing of a sensual perfume beckoning Pepe Le Pew to his feline love.
To jump across the crevice and into the void requires first a circling back, gaining distance from point which will become the springboard for our leap. Next a buildup of momentum, first mental, than physical, which will provide the real fuel for our bootless feet. When that momentum has been sufficiently built up, all engines a go, I run forth, leaping hopeful into the depths of that space across the deep ravine where I float in that mist of my desires.
Ah, if it were so!
But with each leap I find myself neither solely in the realm of my desires nor completely in the harshly lit room of my reality. I am suspended in the contradictory space about that crevice. I have not fallen completely into the ravine, hope remains I will someday make it across, but I am hanging in a suspended animation. What else is there to do in that place but explore the contradictions I find within it?
But what are those contradictions in painting, and how do we express them?
In the painting I’ve looked at and thought about this weekend the contradiction that has flung itself most forcibly into my face has been that between the reality of the space of the canvas as object and the desire of the illusional space within the paint. The two primary exhibitions I focused on in my first day of ‘looking’ were Brice Marden’s New Paintings [along with a few older prints from the early 1970s] at the three spaces of Matthew Marks Gallery on W22nd Street and the Frank Stella Retrospective at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Both artist have spent the past half century exploring the contradiction between real and illusional space in painting; and both acknowledge in their art the same truth. Yet how each has chosen to address this contradiction in his work diverges in directions as contradictory as the space itself. Stella has chosen to the path of reality that the space of painting is and always really remain the flat and impenetrable space of its support, ’the canvas’. No matter what ’the canvas’ is it can be nothing more. Marden has chosen the road that runs at first parallel to the reality, the space of the painting is flat, but then he takes a sharp turn away in the opposite direction; the direction he heads is towards the penetrable space of ‘the paint’, not the impenetrable space of ’the canvas’.
The contradiction exists. There is more than a single way to explore it. Does this mean a single ’truth’ of space in painting cannot exist? I think not. Both Stella and Marden have found the ’truth’ of space in painting as it is rooted in their own desires of expression. But the expression of the desire of the artist is only a single side of the artistic coin. The other side is the desire of the viewer in relation to the ’truth’ of space and painting. Some will follow the path chopped out of the jungle by Stella, others the road Marden has meticulously laid layer for layer. As a painter I select which direction I want to follow as I circle back to the place from which I will gather my personal momentum which will drive me forward, leaping over that crevice, no longer suspended in the space of contradictions and into the misty void of my desires.
On Saturday the second stanza of my looking and thinking excursion took me out to Williamsburg, to the Sideshow Gallery to view a show of paintings by Elizabeth Rodgers and Tim Casey. The paintings of Casey were also an exploration of this contradiction of space in painting. Like Marden Casey takes the road built of layers, layers of color, layers of illusion created by the illuminating reality of the material…the paint. The space Casey constructs, though not as deep as some, does reveal a place at the very back of the canvas where light exists and breaks through some layers, blocked by others, yet if still finds its way through to the very front where it breaks free to shine out at the viewer. By shining out of the depths of the canvas the light in turn beckons the viewer to follow it back into the canvas, becoming the proverbial ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. Casey happened to be at the gallery that afternoon and as we conversed about these notions of the materiality of the paint and the light and space, Marden and Stella, I ran my thoughts on the desire for the delusion of the illusional space over the acceptance and expression of the flatness of the surface. He paused a moment, chuckled and replied, that yeah, that sums up what has been the force behind the momentum powering his own personal leap into the void of his desire the past 45 years he has been swinging his brush.
Before heading out to Williamsburg I took a stroll across W57th Street and around the corner onto Fifth Avenue to look at the recent paintings of John Walker.
My first thoughts I noted down as I entered Alexandre Gallery and faced the paintings of ‘Looking Out to Sea’ was how forcefully Walker embraced painting, and expressed its contradictions through the establishment of contradictions of his own within each painting. Here was not an artist intellectualizing about the canvas, he doesn’t give a hoot about the canvas. Here was a painter handling the paint. Of course the paintings, the canvases are flat. That’s what the surface upon which that paint clings is. But that’s not what painting is about for Walker. It is about the nature of the paint. The reckless abandon with which it can be smeared onto the canvas, built up through an intense, controlled chaos to form a space which does not depict or picture a reality of space on the surface of the canvas, but is an inspiration or meditation on the potential depths of space through the materiality of the paint. The contradictions found through Walker’s handling of the paint, it's raw and refined, that is the place where I break through the suspended animation and find the inroad into the void of my desire.