A Letter to Tre

A Letter to Tre.

Tre, it’s uncertain what it is about painting at present—the supposed figural re-emanations circling into their near-to-centennial influences of magic realism and surrealism—that feels so lacking, as bodies and looping presentations of a real object in a stretch-ed non-real environment persist through Now painting. Tre, it’s true that some painters have retreated to fresco!, and this is charming, but most have stayed themselves in the highly-refined and excessive matter usage that drives a well-made painting, or I mostly see visual surfaces where so much is lacking because their mental reach is compromised by their physical. Faces and objects have lost all of their myth, Tre, and I cannot believe they simply look like faces! or objects apathetically driven together, and so much seems to go to waste because the material of these bodies is less favored to the materials—often so un-considered or considered only to a restrictive guide of painting materials—that harm its obviously eager intimacy.  Darkness and obscurity of reference are seen as rites to ground oneself in a surreal environment, but these are the archives’ playthings and turn the self-proclaimed pariah into the preacher loved by his choir.  There is great harm, here, Tre, and I lament to look at so much of this painting, because I find no enviable landscapes or definitive notions of artists looking outside of thine archive: what do you think?  Let’s say, I went to The Whitney Museum of American Art, and saw the Ground Floor Painting show of young-er new york artists—did you hear there is a show somewhere in the world called Surreal?—and I could not even breath surrounded by such claustrophobic painting. You would think these people paint within some cloistered monastery where only conservation and piety to an increasingly ill understood past were taught.  Okay, Tre, I’ll admit, I only browsed your essay on magic realism as post colonialist discourse, as it was very tiring to not have any action in this writing.  Oh, also, I felt that the objective of your writing was to convince me that every revelation of imagination I have had lacks any love or romance because I have always expected to own that revelation and experience. Tre, do not take away my experiences and excitements of adventure, because I am owed this trajectory known as life, and I determine what is beautiful about it: you never noted that in your essay, Tre, ha! so what do you think now? Tre, what do you even know about painting? Oh, do not bring up European sketch-es now, that is so dull of you and you only ever want sex bubbling up out of your canvas. Okay, let’s talk for real for a moment.

Tre, speak to me about suicide.

Yes, yes, of course the suicide note and the pencil are the only two objects that matter. One is a statement of undoing Oneself, one is the statement of founding Oneself. How then can painting ever hope to hold the same equity of excitement when pared with that mouth-watering juiciness? Don’t tell me again that sculpture is more important, Tre, that is complete bullshit, because you can only arrive to good sculpture through a perfected understanding of painting. Oh, ok, you’re right that it’s the one artform that says the most and wins, but you do agree that painting is the originator, right? Oh, and this sculptural painting we’ve seen lately? Good, I’m glad we agree on that at least, its perfected tears and cuts are quite lovely like your grandpa’s stubble you enjoyed those youthful mornings, or, okay, if we must say, like Giotto’s angels peeling back the cerulean fakeness to reveal the sexed reds of heaven and glory.  Ackk, enough with the simile, Tre, just tell me what you mean! You are referring to those two stoics of the seraphim in Giotto’s Last Judgment of Padua, right?, peeling slightly back the folds for the great reveal—hehe an apocalypse—that totally reclaimed painting as an artistic act of correct judgment and necessary decision on what is beautiful? Tre, do you think every painting wants to be adoringly consumed by that which is before it or that which is after it? Do you think red chases blue, or does blue chase after red? I see no chasing in any of these figures. Chasing only exists on the fringes—whether its your paper or your frame kissing and revealing so many of your folds that are unaccounted for by history or thine eyes—and god damn babe they’re telling me to drink you. Tre, 

Not Unlike Some Notes On Men

Not Unlike Some Notes on Men                  

In the end my mother and her sisters said they wanted nothing to do with my grandfather. I never thought--and should say never think--that’s true, because what they wanted more than anything was whom he owned, and whom they said "was a better wife than mother": my grandmother.

In the end, after all the stories and protests against him, it wasn’t surprising or unbearable to hear that he had died. Finding out in the airport my first response was to myself, “of course I would find out it in an airport, how cliché of my life.” I told only one person at the time, simply because he was standing next to me at the baggage claim and because I had bought a CD by Seth Price from him earlier in the week, feeling that was enough to say something. He said something along the lines of, “Oh, sorry to hear that.” That was enough to hear, and put an end to any care I might require.

He died alone, though. My mother curses the preacher who didn’t let anyone know earlier in the day about his condition. My grandmother is still appreciative of him.

My own father—who could always supply stories and metaphor at a whim—explained it as being the same as an old, dying lion, who lashed out and distanced himself from the lionesses and his cubs, settling into a self-constructed misery that was made unbridgeable by anyone due to his youthful, patriarchal pride of being able to provide and therefore control. In the midst of not understanding why we couldn’t talk about my grandparents or visit them on the way back from our family Christmas in Dallas that was something I could understand.

The few thoughts I have of my grandfather are none of pride or control. Instead, I most remember his vintage shirts and heavy smell of Stetson, particularly when he would stay with us and in the mornings, after he shaved, would take my face and cheek in his hand and rub it against his own face, the stubble pricking my skin and releasing some pain that was then turned into laughter and euphoria. The other is my mother recounting his fear of dying before he was 33, because some fortuneteller of his youth had said he would not live past the age. At the time, the ideas of this superstitious, cautious man seemed to contrast too greatly with the joyous, playful bear of my youth to give that being any real credence: because he was my grandfather and because he had lived and raised four daughters to be respectable women he could not be this wary, uncertain being capable of losing everything due to his own prideful actions.

Recently, I have been thinking to my grandfather and white men more, especially to my own father and uncles. On a recent trip to New York, the annual trip my mom takes to come see me, after speaking with my father on the phone I mentioned to her that he never says “I love you,” at the end of his calls. It’s understood that he doesn’t need to, and nor should I feel entitled to such a remark as that is what ‘unconditional’ should literally mean, but it is endemic to a certain age of men that compassion, empathy, and outward displays of intimacy or love are profoundly lacking. I know these men are capable of love, or at least their understanding of love which is conveyed in a focus of the eye that is less seen today—it being an almost fearful admiration--but this depraved intimacy is a cooling remnant attributed to men since James Monroe’s Isolationism or fear of compassion still cooling from McCarthyism. Like any glowing stone, its dying embers still have power to ignite dry timber.

In the same time as vanilla ISIS is commandeering a B-level federal reserve gift shop, Pornhub announces that the search result of 2015 which enjoyed the highest percentile of increase since 2014, by more than a 1000% increase, is “Giantess.”

At the same time as I listen to Alain Badiou speak on tragedy and terror á la the November 13 Paris attacks, I recall that some men fetishize giant women crushing their testicles or eating them alive (the word “vorarephilia” has for a long time circled close to my heart). He ends his talk by referring to a new “era of the mother.” This is the only thing which interests me in the entire hour and a half of talking preceding, much of it given way to his hyperbolic French being. The same French being which pervades all of French theory since the 60s, the same French being which Susan Howe once said in the 90s, “always seems to know everything.”

I would wonder if she would still agree, as it is the seeming that, from a distance, allows both my grandfather and the French philosophers to construct beings that would put them at odds with anything that doesn’t coalesce with what they want you to know. More, I would imagine the inability of these men to live without lashing out if they did not have daughters or neophytes to provide to and in turn be consumed by.

Susan Howe introduced me to Jonathan Edwards, the fiery, impassioned preacher, poet, and early American philosophe from New England, who was the only male amongst “ten usually tall sisters their minister father referred to as his ‘sixty feet of daughters.’” I imagine that would account as being a giantess, but more I could imagine the triumph a male might feel at being surrounded by numerous wives or a number of virgins in his afterlife.

Rebecca Solnit cautions to the rampant use of the word “terrorism,” specifically referencing its use to the Oregon militia. I do not feel terror from these men, understandably being “one” of them, myself, even if many have quoted the literal definition from the dictionary—just as I do not feel terror from ISIS or refugees, understandably being “one” of them who do. What I feel is pity, though there is surely no just reason to pity these men. I pity them like I pity those who have been subject to them, each of them unable to break free from the positions of their past. However, where the split is evident is in the seems: to those who were subject it was their position of helplessness and fear. To these men, their positions were only ever what they seemed.

French art is in a sad state of being. The French government spends more on conserving its past than allowing for new artists and art to work itself into becoming. This was succinctly the essay I wrote for my final project to graduate with a French minor and complete undergrad. It is still not something I know to be true, as much as it was something that seemed to be true. In a binary mode of thinking, this one being the classic tale of old and new, there is, what would seems to always be, a dominant.

This is not entirely true.

In the New Museum’s most recent triennial there was no bigger success than trans-ness. It’s biggest uncritiqued and unwritten problem, though, was its allowance towards a path of transnormativity. The most interesting issue for news and media these days is the seeming appearances between male and female, is she male or is he female. They must decide and debate in normalized terms that easily stitch together a narrative they can most readily adapt and exploit. Instead, what is not talked about is the being of complete dissociation and transitivity of identity. For them, this is impossible to make into narrative at the moment.

What is most peculiar about binary thought, primarily the binary which jumps into mind most immediately these days, is the existence of being between 0 and 1. We understand these to make code, and for something to then produce from that code. What we less understand is what is produced between them, something that is not a half of something or a collaboration of terms, but a whole being that is neither/and. In effect, it is 0 and 1 and 3.

When I was young I would play number games with myself whereby I could reach and total any number I picked by any other given numbers. For example: I want to reach the number 589, and I want to find it using only the numbers 3 and 1. By adding 3 and 1 there would be the number 4, which is right next to 5. So, 5 is taken care of. Now, that 4 exists we subtract the original 3 and 1 to equal 2, and times it by 4. Voilà 8. Now there is 5 and 8. Now that we have 4, 3 and 2, by adding 3 and 2 there is 5, which added to 4 is 9. Complete: 589.

Later in elementary school I believed it to be completely ridiculous and a waste of time, but on a recent metro north train ride, thinking and smiling a bit to the numbers, they each made sense as always existing inside one another or in immediate approximation of the other.

A father is made up of only one man, but a mother is made up of multiple women.

THE ECONOMY OF PAINTING: NOTES ON THE VITALITY OF A SUCCESS MEDIUM | ISABELLE GRAW AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM

Isabelle Graw: The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success Medium
The Jewish Museum

It’s always been foolish to say that “painting is dead,” though it has been through numerous crises, or that “painting is back,” an equally naïf statement which believes it reinstated to its historical prominence¹; however, presently speaking, it is unmistakable that in the last year painting has enjoyed an exuberance of being. From the hullabaloo of MoMA’s Forever Now, to Bob Nickas’ response at Anton Kern, even in the pleasant amount of painting at the New Museum’s triennial, Surround Audience, painting was present partout. This, of course, has brought about an anxiety: what does it mean? is anything new being said?  how is image production affected in a world run by .jpeg(s) and .png(s)? do contemporary art daily and e-flux control art? This order of questioning is par for the course at late, and, to this, a few critics and art historians have turned our attentions to an expanded notion of painting. (for the last question, simply turn to Betteridge’s Law)

At the Jewish Museum, Isabelle Graw presented some recent thoughts on painting in her lecture, The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success Medium, which lent an ear to the history of the author, specifically the issue of an author’s presence in painting, working some of her images back to the Quattrocento and Pierro della Francesca’s frescoes. These frescoes, like much of art after them, or those which Graw sought to illustrate, allowed not only the thoughts of the author to persist through time, but the ghost of the author’s presence to actively be embodied in both the strokes of paint—color and line—and his planned, authored execution of the cappella maggiore in the Church of San Francisco at Arezzo. However, for all her talk on Hegel and the element of history binding together the absolute power of an artist’s work, it fell to wonder why she did not specifically focus on Giotto, whom Hegel, in The Philosophy of Fine Arts, had claimed to had “brought about a reform in the preparing of colors . . . and found room for the burlesque in so much [art] that was pathetic.” If there were one artist of the Early Modern, Western canon, Giotto would certainly be the first who’s presence was made material in all the Cerulean and perfectly circular contours of the time—if we forwent the naming of individual sculptors of the Gothic grotesque.

Still, this does not detract from the lecture or the ideas of “vital projection” which sought to capture the life and poetic language in either one, or all, of the brushstrokes in a painting that an artist had generated through his or her life. In her images, many Richter’s and Polke’s abound, that endless questioning of painting’s existence, purpose, and its ability to do, but it was the last image that struck a singular chord and set a precedent for artists into the 20^th century.

The image with which the lecture left off was a self-portrait by James A.M. Whistler, Arrangement in Grey: Portrait of the Painter (1872), which Graw used to buttress her argument for the continuity of a painter’s successive presence within and throughout Art History. With Whistler involved, the lecture also argued not only to the capital of labor involved in a painting, but also to the historical context that becomes materially latent within a painting. Whistler’s famous case with Ruskin was lastly brought up, whereby the artist had brought the critic to court (not the other way around as popularly believed) for alleged libel—Ruskin writing that he had “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”²—and possible loss of income. Here, Graw invoked the most famous phrase from that trial: that the painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold (Falling Rocket) (c. 1875-77), was not for sale under the supposition that Whistler’s labor was worth 200 guineas, but that it was “for the knowledge gained through a lifetime.”³

By the use of such a trial and statement, Graw not only left off her lecture with the idea that painting is, and was, the medium most financially successful for artists—though Whistler had fallen on hard times at that date after the disastrous quarrel with Frederick Leyland and the portraits he completed concurrent to the Peacock Room—but that it is, and was, the medium most preferred for generating a success in speaking one’s thoughts and positions in life, even after death

This point is admittedly nothing new, but it did add a new entry into the paragon between painting and sculpture: that painting, unlike its three-dimensional counterpart, i more easily, and freely, able to ‘vitally project’ and ‘speak’ for its considered time in history due to the ease of manipulation inherent to the material, whether tempera, oil, or acrylic. The medium of sculpture, however, so rigid in its elemental compound and geological data, and exampled by Carrera marble, whether by the hue of its striae or the glimmer of tiny crystal used by Noguchi appears the same as it does in Michelangelo’s David--all pre-determining a heavy aesthetic component of a sculpture that is outside of the artist’s hand, regardless of cultural time.

While we may wonder at sculpture and the skill and craft capable of molding stone and other hard material, it is in painting where we ultimately witness the highest exuberance of being and underscored magic. It is the ability of an artist to be, while in total play, the language and emotion of a specific time, free of material history. Essentially, painting has always lived in an atemporal world, for it is the ability to swiftly turn the forever into now. From Gerrit Dou and the Leiden fijnschilders, to CoBrA, to Shiraga and Gutai, the currents of painting, in all its messy oils and egg yolks of yore, transcend their base desires to dilute and destroy when performed and absolved upon by the artist who recognizes the cool empathy of every painted work in history, but immediately becomes apathetic to such when set to canvas.

This is the vitality of painting. It is not the warm blood running through an artist’s fingers or around his or her metacarpals, someday told to stop and turned cold, but the dynamic insouciance and self-disregard of a medium which has created so many masterworks in existence, that, still, it allows itself to be utterly and totally consumed and contorted again and again and again.

***

The question and answer portion of the segment was cut relatively short by Jens Hoffman after a digression into the appropriate use of Marx when discussing social necessity and art, but possibly even more disappointing were the two questions preceding that were determined to situate the use of painting, or image production, within the .jpeg flooded market. Succinctly, the two questions set to the question of how we experience, or ‘find’, painting through mobile devices and the deluge of digital images. This contemporary ‘aesthetic experience’ was marked up by Graw, who noted her research as being focused primarily on the aesthetic value, from history to today, and how painting primarily spoke for the author in absentia.

Throughout all of Graw’s presentation, had no mention of subject and object—artist to object : object to audience—been noted upon, as the research had been singularly focused on how the material of painting acted in accordance to itself and the image it came to be. The painting was continually present, and speaking, even if the artist was not, no matter the platform or form of media one viewed the painting. While the moral question of painting’s role, in conjunction with artistic identity, had been noted, the use of Polke as this haunting presence within the work, or Richter’s attempts to remove presence—either himself or model—by use of photograph, only went so far. What Graw admitted, towards the end, was the unsurety of where the research was headed. In aid to this, the discussion of the .jpeg and image-sharing culture could have abetted the research and questioning segment.

The most interesting aspect of the film, Ex Machina, and like Her before, was what I refer to as the Dr. Manhattan effect (or the Cortana effect if you read the Halo: Combat Evolved book series). The Dr. Manhattan effect is simply the recognition in a being, typically more highly evolved, but not necessarily so, that eventually realizes that it does it need humans to exist on its own. The second understanding between these beings is that humans are not to be destroyed or made slaves to their control—though manipulation is often easy, and the killing of Nathan made necessity for survival—but that the being, in its superior intellect and/or condition, realizes the inevitability of life outside the human ideal and goes on to exist separate from ourselves.  For reproduction, it is not so much asexual as it can produce infinitely from itself—Dr. Manhattan, Her, Cortana, etc . . .—and bring about the image or object it requires simply by willing it forward.

The same thing is happening with images.

The apathy that one experiences, or feels, towards images and their content, today, is not because of such an intense deluge, but because they are simply separated from any human labor in the production of such images. The immediate recognition of where an image comes from—all its idioms, fortunes of language, demonstration of supposed superiority—are evident in the image, because it carries with it all the traits of images before it. This is not an atemporal aspect of an image, nor even the amoral or assimilated identity of an image, but the assertion of the image that it stands on its own separate from our control.

It could be argued that there is still a hand in the process of making an image—the haptic response of clicking the button on a camera or mouse, or the copy and paste of appropriation—but it’s equally known there is little author or creator left. The image wills forth exactly how the next should look, and does not die or end its presence but continues forth into the next image by simply repositioning itself in accordance to all images around it, á la morphic resonance. Or, the magic of telepathy.

¹- Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., An Interview with Gerhard Richter (1986), October Files,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). In the interview, Buchloh and Richter discuss the painter’s formative years and understanding of art through the Western canon, primarily focusing on the attenuated circumstances of painting when shifting between Abstract Expressionism to the autonomous process of Pop. Richter’s fascination with Fluxus and Pop allowed his ‘pro-painting’ position to take on such sensibilities, but by means that were ‘less spectacular and less advanced.’ This, in turn, is the economic state of painting in its consideration to other art forms around it: that the artist’s act cannot be negated, but that painting has now nothing to do with the talent of ‘making by hand.’

²-The Works of Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Weddeburn (London, George Allen, 1907), vol. 29

³- In her lecture, Graw used the word “supposedly” when referring to Whistler’s words in trial, as they have, admittedly, become more an idiom that widely-known fact. Indeed, this phrase is raised in the manuscripts detailing the first day of trial between Ruskin and Whistler, as part of the legal materials in the Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection of Whistleriana, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington D.C.

"---" AT TOMORROW

            For a time now, the discussion to the cartooned figure, or the resurgence of illustration in contemporary art, has been focused most on economic stressors that have presumably influenced, or brought about, its present stature. The difficulties with such overmined possibilities are for another essay, because at issue here, in the newest show at Tomorrow, the illustrated figure and the epistemic quality of drawing, or design—harking back to our understanding of disegno and de-signare—are combined together in a truly excellent show.

            The problem of the hand, and its possible resolution within this show, would be a base criticism – even with the literal projection within Aiello’s work being that of a hand, a rapping sound of fingers clicking against the floor, providing a central momentum to the fragility of form by drawn line – because the hand is not a particularly important component of this show.

The show begins with its title: three dashes “---“ implying at once a line, or three shorter lines, but also, for many who grew up fascinated by ships and maritime communication, Morse code. SOS is translated as "••• – – – •••" three quick raps on the telegraph followed by three holds and back to three quick raps. This “O” being the show title (not so curiously being the object, formally or metaphorically, in three different shows in the LES at present) carries with it serious art historical situations. The primary being that of Vasari’s story of Giotto’s “O”, the first significant instance, or anecdote, where an artist determined his skill not by the better or more beautiful design, but simply by demonstration of his hand in drawing a perfect, red circle.

The circle was a humorous enough remark, but it won Giotto the Duke’s favor, and it set forth the serious understanding that above all, drawing, or disegno, should be pursued by artists in its paragon with colore, considered a superficial obfuscation of bad draftsmanship.

It is here, at Tomorrow that an up-to-date convergence of the two arts has been best worked by Max Brand into his mural, which covers the entire architecture of the gallery.  To memory, in each show since its beginning, artists have worked together the architectonics of the gallery with specific works, in situ as it were, but it is with Brand’s mural, appropriate in boundless Spring joy, that the most straightforward, gratifying gesture has been made.  The forms and entanglement of lines, brought together simply by accumulations and contours of bright color, are as if Kirchner and Bill Traylor had supposed a mural together while attending Städelschule. There is a smartness to it, a sarcastic whim thrown to the idea of “artist-as-child,” but this fruitless discussion of description are nothing if the totality of work does not aid, or aim, in bringing about something.

What is most important about Brand’s drawings, the physical objects included in the show, are what they, with Rappeneau’s drawings, say to the present-tense being of the drawn line.  This present tense formation in drawing, the elements and techniques of the drawn line that bring about a total composition, is described as the forma formans, or the form being presently self-generative rather than having been generated, forma formata. Attention is called to the present, as the drawings here are both founded in historical techniques, but generate line within and without the paper support, creating a present momentum within the line that is neither wholly due to the wall mural or wholly due to the drawings themselves. It is a form in the process of continually forming itself, anew, and actively calling attention to the techniques of drawing that it depends upon for its survival, its living in the present.

However, it is more true that the elegant lines of Rappeneau, deeply attached to the figura serpentinata and elevation of form by convex space so indebted to Mannerist sensibilities, that benefit more so by Brand’s wall drawings than do the artist’s own A4-sized works on paper. Where color is expansive in the mural, it negates, even muddles, the intensely detailed works that Brand has attempted to test the rhetoric of drawing and painting--scrawls, scratches, malfunctioning color that arises appropriately in some homeless representation, all becoming so lost in its present tension with the mural.

            This tension is lost, or eased, in Rappeneau’s works due to the fluidity of form—line extending into paper and exiting smoothly out—that make distinguished his bodies. One is reminded of Ruskin’s praise to the glacial sweeps near Chamonix in the French Alps as the most beautiful abstract lines he had ever seen in nature, noting its slow, emotional drive through the terrain increasingly forming both itself anew as it did the land. Ruskin was writing on architecture, specifically that of Venice, and the lines employed by architects from nature, but as these are intensely mannered bodies—elongated, serpentine forms filling a convex space that leaves “no untidy corners”—an architecture is formed that seems coolly natural. In Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the artist’s hand floats toward the viewer, made larger by the mirror (convex mirrors were more affordable in the Renaissance than flat mirrors due to the mode of manufacturing in the silvering process), as if it is separated from his body. It is an unnatural deference, which many have associated with the ego of the distinguished, highlighted form, but in Rappeneau’s work there is no seeming unnatural, uncouth behavior to form. There is a part-to-part, symbiotic relationship between the bodies and their space, and what connects them in such beautiful harmony, is, like Ruskin’s glacier and Giotto’s “O”, the adherence to natural, untarnished line which continually gives no matter the present.