Art Miami

Next to the word oxymoron in the dictionary are two other words: Art Miami.

My own experience is that art is a butterfly. It goes where it likes and you can't hold it. It is also a little like what I would imagine God would be like if there was a God; more likely to have hung out with Henry David Thoreau than at the Vatican. We go to museums to see dead butterflies pinned to the walls and hope there is still a little life left in them. And that is all I have to say about that.

Hello!

First off I've been consumed by a major project since April. It is just starting to turn the corner.

I've also just curated a show at Bow Street in Harvard Square, called STICKY CRAW. The idea of the show is complicated. It involves the subtle influence of the Funnies on art. The Funnies, Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, etc. The kind of subtle and unconscious influence that could almost be considered subversive. The kind of subtle and unconscious influence that could be considered negative or undesirable, and therefore negative and undesirable and controversial to even mention or reference. As I said in the essay, it is not like the German Expressionists or Picasso claiming African art as an influence. Everybody is cool with that. But let's face it, the cartoon world is much more prevalent and even pleasant in that way that we get pleasure from it, even if it is just the contact high we get from kids enjoying it. It is a happy subculture.

So looking at late Guston and seeing cartoons is a no-brainer. R. Crumb where are you? Looking at Marsden Hartley and seeing cartoons seems downright sacrilegious. But all you have to do is look. I was very uncomfortable luring artists into this show and then having them find out they were in something that might not be a positive connotation. I did it anyway. Nina Nielsen didn't think humor had anything to do with her work for example. Turns out Brian Washburn was comfortable with the association. Larry Deyab(Lawrence de Yab) was right there. I get the feeling everyone else, Margrit Lewzcuk, Mike Carroll, would have preferred not to have the association. Rory Parks I don't know. I've hit sort of a sour note on this one. Went too far. Trusted my gut and got busted. OK, I still think it's a great show. People, including Nina, really like the look of it. As I always say, just an excuse to hang some work.

I guess I should have just put myself in it. Jon Friedman observed that my images came from that kind of cartoon reality in a review he wrote of my work in ARTS Magazine almost thirty years ago. I wasn't so sure about it then either, especially since I had grown up in Europe without television, but on some level it was OK. My color and way of looking at form was not of this world, and humor played a very big role in that work. It was definitely more Marsden Hartley than Pearlstein. Next time I'll just speak for myself. My own sticky craw.

Larry Deyab: Return of the Native

Larry Deyab has reached a really important place in painting; a place where painting can't really start until you get there: nowhere. No one really wants to end up there, but when you do, well, you let out a sigh. Milton Resnick once told Deyab that that is how you know a good painting: it makes the sound of a sigh.




Larry Deyab is serious about painting. So much so that out of the MFA program at Columbia in the early Eighties he apprenticed himself to two of the best we've had, two painter's painters, Bill Jensen and Milton Resnick. As their assistant he mopped up, all the while soaking up their greatness.




Greatness was his destination back then, it was the plan, plan A, the only plan, the don't mess with my plan plan, but now that he has matured, and it is nowhere that lets him not only paint, but be himself, and make the paintings that he knew were inside of him, perhaps even the greatness that he knew was inside of him.




He looks back on that work he did when he was caught up in being great, when he was a New York painter, and he sees contrivance. He looks at the paintings he is doing now in Cambridge, the place of his upbringing(home?) that has for the moment inconveniently derailed him and he sees paintings that just are: just right.




These are the paintings he has always wanted to paint. In them he sees it all, paintings that tap into it all and reflect it all: dreams, culture, politics, poetry, religion, yes, all of humanity, love, fear, longing, suffering, and humor. A lot of humor. Surprising humor. Sly humor. Sardonic humor. Absurd humor. Ironic humor! The outright shake your head at the crazy way life does its thing humor. Black comedy stalking The Divine Comedy.





Larry Deyab has a wry smile for life. He smokes his cigars. Sometimes he drinks alone. In fifteen minutes he might do a painting that if he spent fifteen years on it wouldn't look any different. As Whistler pointed out: fifteen minutes, yes, but a lifetime of experience.




Larry Deyab is still serious about painting, but most of his images strangely enough come from the movies. Movies that tell us about ourselves; that tell us about each other. Images that he steals for himself, to speak for himself.

Is the work cinematic? Yes. Videographic? Yes! Motion? Yes! Still? Yes! Blur. Blurred in ways that keeps the eye in flux like a camera that can't establish automatic focus. Framed. Framed tight. The spray-painted surface flies in and out--from sharp to soft and fast and slick to brittle and rough and scattered.

The freshest canvasses are black and white house paint with some red spray paint. Weeks or days old. They are painted in natural light on his back porch, sometimes with very little, almost in darkness, studied in darkness, like the glow of a tv screen. They work on us that way, stamped on our retinas that way. Imposing themselves. Iconic phosphorescence. They conjure up words like Purgatory, graffiti, refugee, haunting, urban, and ear!

And then Larry Deyab reads-- all the time, mostly biographies, mostly about artists. He is looking for clues. Clues about the mystery ride that is art and about the riders, what made them go, what made them great. Right now he's staying up late, taking painkillers, and reading a new book on Turner. And he's stuck, stuck in Cambridge. Waiting to get back to somewhere, anywhere: Paris, Berlin, New York. Hoboken even. But right now, right now nowhere is a pretty good place to paint after all. From the looks of things, maybe as good as it gets.





Addison Parks, Cambridge
-- Post From My iPhone

Non-Refundable YES!

Faith is the non-refundable "yes!" Think about it. If you had had a non-refundable yes for that thing, that dream you bailed on in high school or college or later, and someone said to you, sorry, you can't be an artist, you would have said, sorry, NON-REFUNDABLE YES! With maybe a "get out of my way!" If when you got knocked down, when you hurt and it didn't seem worth it: sorry, NON-REFUNDABLE YES! Gotta get back up and keep going. Keep on Keepin' on, as this wise old West Indian woman I once knew used to say! Muriel. She was like God or Gandi she was so wise, and there she was, a maid for a spoiled English family.

I know people who are determined that someone else pay for that thing they want to do, like getting investors instead of taking the money out of their own pocket. Why would you do it any other way? You want to make a movie, get someone else to pay for it. It is the inevitable conclusion of artists who are always trying to sell their work, so that they can recoup their investment, get someone else to pay for it, get a refund! That would justify it. Right!

Wrong! A non-refundable yes! Pay for it. Therapists always say you get more out of therapy when you pay for it. Of course they would say that, but maybe they're on to something. You want to do something; pay for it. No refunds. And keep on keepin' on. That's how you keep the faith!

No big deal!

I like painting. I like the place painting takes me. I like looking at painting. I even like thinking about painting and talking about it.

I like the freedom that comes with it. I like the freedom I find in getting there and being there. And, I like painting in general, not just my painting. It is a chicken and egg thing; because it happened when I was so young, I don't know which came first, liking painting or liking paintings!

But I find freedom in painting, doing it, looking at it, loving it. The world of color and mark and imagination and light and seeing and feeling and vibrancy and intensity. Seeing. Feeling. Dreaming. Flying. Freedom.

Not many people see it this way, of course. The world is dog eat dog. The world has agendas. It makes it turn, apparently. I can live with that. Especially because I have painting.

The art world means business, which is why it has nothing to do with art, or painting. There is no getting around this, no having your cake and eating it. Make no mistake; let there be no confusion about this. The art world means business.

I was sort of shocked yesterday when I checked out a show on line. Held and Pearlstein. There were all these pronouncements and proclamations. Manifestos that made long lists of nos. Entirely about what it wasn't about as though there was such a thing.

I was once interested in the Brights, an athiest organization. The problem was, they focused on what they weren't instead of what they were, and that did not interest me.

It was as though Pearlstein and Held felt like they needed to make all these rules about why they weren't in order to be legitimate and important and powerful. Of course I think it is just the work of critics and dealers. Like me, they just liked to paint.

But if I have to prove something to be a painter, forget it. Not going to happen. Who cares? I would rather be free, which is why most painters just take their paints and go somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere they can be free. Anywere they can paint.

Otherwise you just get a lot of people with agendas, with opinions, with rules and restrictions and punishments. If you want permission to be free, to paint, you have to give it to yourself, and keep giving it to yourself, and if you do that, if you give it to yourself, then no one can take it from you, can they? And how cool is that?


-- Post From My iPhone

Your lap!

It is really hard to embrace the responsibility that being an artist entails. Most artists would turn back if they realized the truth. But the truth is not a bad thing. Quite the contrary. The truth will not only set you free, as they say, it will save you.

Now we all know that artists get warned before they choose a life of art: it will be hard, it will be a struggle, it will mean suffering. As though some other life can somehow side step these things. What they don't tell you is why!

Why is it going to hurt? Why? Why is devoting your life to this mystery called art going to hurt so much?

Before I get to that, sorry, I want to talk about something totally connected to that pain. False expectations! False expectations dog the would be artist from day one! False expectations are laid at your feet, stuffed in your pockets, dropped in your drink! They are everywhere. I remember one of the first stuffed in my pocket: "when you're famous..."

People were always being kind when I was a boy, and asking me to sign things so that they would have them when I was famous. Harmless enough. But right there is the information that being an artist inevitably leads to fame, that art and fame go together, that maybe you can't have art without fame.

But that's not the half of it. Artists seem to inherit a boat load of expectations. Like getting support for spending time making art, instead of for spending 40 or 50 hours a week in a cubicle, or a factory, or on a construction site, or in the office. Like people are supposed to show your work, or buy your work, or like your work, or even care about it. Like it is supposed to matter or be important. I know of very few artists who are not psychotically obsessed in this regard.

An artist's responsibility is not to make others care about their work. But who knew? It is very hard to get around this for most people. People are supposed to want to help artists in their quest for fame. Right?

Being an artist hurts because artists believe all the crap they see and hear along the way. Even successful artists fall prey to this stuff in a quest for more: more support, more attention, more celebrity. How many times do you hear about artists leaving one gallery to go to another because they didn't think that they were being treated well enough. Or well-known artists who are depressed because they aren't more well-known?

Art is a gift. That gift is a responsibility. Gifts are for giving. Again, remember why you did it in the first place. Stay close to the bone. They don't call it the razor's edge for nothing.

Is it time for a "Moment of Tuttle?" No. Maybe later. In the meantime. Keep your expectations where they belong. Squarely on yourself. In your lap!




-- Post From My iPhone

What's Best?

When I was a teenager I watched two of my older brothers have a heated argument over a pick-up truck. One of them was arguing for what he thought was the "best" truck, and the other claimed that there was no such thing, that the only thing there was, was the truck that was best for him. At the bottom of it was one brother telling the other that his truck sucked.

The rest of my family was bored and annoyed by the pissing match, but I was anything but. I knew that one was being a jerk and the other was taking the bait and being defensive. Still, the excuse for the argument fascinated me, and it fascinates me still.

See, I believed the brother with the shitty truck, but no one else did. Everyone else thought that there was such a thing as the "best" truck. They totally believed that, and the brother with a masters in philosophy and a law degree was left to piss in the wind while the one who never finished high school and was most likely high won the day.

Now I have been pissing in the wind on this one my whole life. There is no talking to people who think that there is an official best, and worse, that they know what it is, and worse still, that they know what's best for you. Like my brother who never finished high school. He knew. Never mind that he should have been on the other side of the argument, being the stoner and all. But if you asked me, knowing what is best for you is the secret to happiness. If you asked me, knowing what is best for you is the secret to life.

A few years after that argument I met Richard Tuttle, and he was talking about the same thing, only articulation wasn't his strong suit. In all fairness it is not an easy subject, and just yesterday I felt like an idiot trying to explain it to someone.

Tuttle introduced the idea of what's right into the conversation, exchanging right for best, as in " what's right for you." I sure wanted to know. I listened to him so hard it made my head hurt, and then I tried to explain it in an article I wrote about him for a local newspaper. Needless to say I made a hash of it.

Somehow it comes off as a defensive argument, like it did with my brother. There's what everybody knows, and then there's stubborn you. That's how I felt yesterday. And that's it in a nutshell; the whole world represents the objective truth, what everybody thinks, and up against that is the subjective, you, little ole you, what you think. Good luck with that.

You do it your way and to hell with you. It will be more than your piss in the wind. So how could you possibly be happy after that? How could you possibly be happy bucking all those who know what is best, and best for you? Reminds me of a Stones jingle: a man comes on the television...can't get no...

A few years ago, actually more like 15, I took this whole thing a step further. I started listening to something deeper when making important choices in my life. I started listening to the same little voice I listened to while painting. Not the official voice, the trained voice, the objective truth voice, but the other one, the one that just liked something because it felt like it.

No surprise, that little voice was just what was left of my voice period. After parents and siblings and teachers and bosses and friends and girlfriends and books and television and mentors and you name it. My little voice was my voice and I needed to start listening to it not just in a crisis or when push came to shove, inotherwords when I was forced to, but every day. Every minute of every day.

I started doing that. I made decisions that felt right for me, not because they were good on paper, but because they were good to me. People in positions of power will not approve of this. Having a mind of your own will get twisted into something bad. Doing what feels right to you will be twisted into something selfish. But you have to believe. You have to learn to hear your voice and listen to it and have faith in it. The consequences may be difficult. You may lose people you thought loved you; you may upset people who professed to have your best interests at heart.

On the other hand you may find yourself in a job that everybody else thinks is great. You may find yourself in a relationship that everybody else thinks is great. Pleasing yourself would mean changing your job maybe, or your work, or your relationship. If you do this you risk angering those who know what's best for you. But if they love you, if they are your true friends, they will understand.

If they love you and respect you they will trust you to know what's best for you and they will let you make the mistakes which will invariably happen. You won't always get it right, but you would be surprised. If you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need...

OK, I know I have a tangle of stuff here that is making me sound like an idiot again. There's the subjective vs objective choice, the whole lemming thing vs what I called as a teacher "it's ugly but it's mine," and then there is the how you know aspect, which probably sounds a lot like what people call judgment vs intuition. Throw in the group vs the individual and yes, they are all the same thing when you get right down to it, including the consequences the individual must face in dealing with the group.

The problems for the individual only begin when they learn to listen to their individual voice, which is not only what the artist depends on, it is what society depends on from the artist. Hamlet has always been an artist's guy. His soliloquy, well, that is the question for every artist. It is what Richard Tuttle was wrestling with when I met him. He was the "ugly but it's mine" artist and he thought I was too concerned with conventional ideas of beauty. What he didn't factor in was that I had grown up in Rome while he had grown up in New Jersey. We had different stuff in our blood. Ironically he committed the crime of thinking he knew what was best for me, an about-face or violation of his own core belief.

Happens all the time. He thought I was going through the objective to find the subjective, he drew it like going one way around a circle instead of say, the other, finding the objective through the subjective; finding the world around you by listening to the voice inside you instead of finding the voice inside you by going through the world around you. Looking inward vs looking outward. I think Richard Tuttle discovered looking inward, like a convert, twice born, where as I was born that way. It might make sense to balance the two, of course, but that is something else.

Still, you get the idea. Right? There's Frank Sinatra's "My Way," and then there's "My way or the highway, Buster!" There's the "no I in team," or as Michael Jordan put it, "but there's an I in win, coach!" That's the thing. At the back or front or bottom or top of every group there is an individual. It is really their way! Where the buck stops. Chief. Chiefs and indians. Coach and team. Alpha or beta. To be or not to be. The pack or the path. Their voice or yours! Their truck or yours! What's it gonna be, boy? What's it gonna be?

-- Post From My iPhone

Where Art Happens

Recently someone asked me why I don't teach my children "art." I was after all, they argued, an excellent art teacher at some top schools on and off for over twenty years. My last teaching stint was at RISD in the Foundation program a dozen years ago, and I quit to be with my family when my second oldest was born.

I've written before about the greatest lesson I learned as a teacher: how important it was to embrace the notion that you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink. When I was a young teacher I assumed that it was my job to get the horse to drink. My oldest helped me as much as anyone to let go of that assumption. He is now a painter and getting his masters at Columbia, and if I had tried to teach him anything he would be in banking.

These days I have taken this idea of "preserving the horse's right to drink when it feels like it" a step further; let the horse find his own way to the water! Or not! I tried to explain this to my friend. Yes, I have always shared the belief that you can't teach art, and was a teacher only to preserve this freedom. Which was why I quit teaching when I did; because I was uncomfortable with the charade. But now I really believe it. No way you can teach art, no way, and the very idea is offensive.

So of course this person asked me "then why art school?" I answered, "simple, art school gives you a chance to be doing the thing you love to do without worrying about the real world, and it allows you to be surrounded by people who care about what you care about."

No one learns anything in art school. Anything of value at any rate. At least not directly as a result of teaching. They learn by doing, by accident, by example. You can't teach that.

It always kills me when people talk about outsider and self-taught artists. Everybody is self-taught when it comes to art. Encouragement is the only thing that can make a difference, frankly. I got a lot of encouragement as a young artist, but I never learned anything from a teacher, not from Severini, not from Exeter, not from RISD, not from Richard Tuttle or Charles Seliger or Leon Polk Smith. Yes, they all encouraged me. Some wise person once referred to teaching as passing the poison. Truer words were never spoken. I spent two years detoxing when I got out of RISD. I was lucky, though, because I kept painting(the other day someone told me 1 in 10 kept at it after RISD). Nonetheless I'm sure I have poison in me still.

My kids get to see me painting in my studio. They get to see and be around the art in our home and gallery. They make stuff all the time. Over the holiday my oldest was home from school and he had everyone making collaborative drawings. Without question I was the weak link, the one who needed to get with it, the one who needed an attitude adjustment, the one who needed to lose the kind of excess baggage that we only pick up in school.

Who knows where art happens? And that is the beauty of it; no one.

-- Post From My iPhone

Charles Seliger (1926 - 2009)

This is my first attempt at writing something about the passing of Charles Seliger. I made a hash of it. It is not in my nature to throw things away, and also to quit looking for the good in things, so I'll leave it up for the time being.

Six weeks ago my friend the painter Charles Seliger died of a massive stroke he suffered while attending an opening at Michael Rosenfeld, his gallery. He sat down in the office, complained of some dizziness and hearing problems and then it happened. Strokes are apparently like an earthquake, once they get started there is no stopping them. When this one was over, Charles Seliger was dead at eighty-three.

I had been composing a letter to Charles in my head for weeks when I heard the news. A letter he never got. Like everyone I was stunned. Months earlier I had picked up a little catalogue from Peggy Guggenhiem's place in Venice, La Collezione, that had both Charles and Gino Severini listed together on the same page. I had been given private mural instruction from Severini as a boy in Rome; I had known and learned from Charles for 30 years and my house is filled with paintings he had so generously gifted me over that time. The catalog is over fifty years old and signed by Guggenhiem, twice. I thought he would get a kick out of it. He had shown with her at Art of This Century when he was just eighteen. A few years ago the Venice museum gave him a show and really fêted him and he loved it. He told me in great length how he spoke to a group of school girls who sat crossed-legged on the floor in their uniforms and listened with rapt attention as he told them his stories of art.

Charles Seliger was an artist and a painter all his life. It was his life. It was not a parade, and he did not parade like so many artists. Nor was it an act of struggle or rebellion. It was so much a part of his life that he was happy to share it with the life around him. He had a family. He had a job! And he painted. He was not a bohemian. He was an artist. Artist as poet, explorer, gardener, astronomer, composer, and botanist. Artist as painter.

Charles Seliger was not like other artists. He worked differently. For this reason not everyone gets him. He could easily be considered one of the great painters of our time; that is, if like I said, everyone got him. I have probably written about Charles more than anyone, and I only just figured this out. After he died! Like any artist he loved hearing someone speak intelligently about his work. He would have really loved this.

Charles Seliger was in many ways a paradox. I've known a lot of artists who worked really hard to cultivate some mysterious and enigmatic persona; he did not. Never mind that he lived in the burbs, worked for a corporation, had a family, was incredibly well read and capable in any number of areas. He was absolutely unique and unusual as an artist.

When some people look at his work they see something that seems very tame. They can't get past what looks obsessive-compulsive, like the gilded lily. They see a highly detailed and yes, lovingly articulated abstract image that seems quiet like the man himself. How could such a quiet man be an artist? How could such a quiet man die of a stroke?

This quiet man, gentle man, had something fierce inside him. A fierce beast upon which his work was firmly built. The beast was at the bottom of him and at the bottom of his work. Call it fire, some primal brute force, call it what you like. It was and is there, in the work. Most artists either have it or don't. If they have it, it usually has its way in the work. The artist is loathe to do what Seliger did, loathe to sublimate the beast for fear of killing it. Yes, the beast and the lily are really two aspects of the same thing. Charles risked the unthinkable; he did in fact, not gild the lily but instead carefully and to great purpose brought that fierce something into the light. And while he gave the beast its run; however, he did not let it run amok. He let it cut the trail of the work; the rest was something else. The rest was what Charles Seliger aspired to, but he knew that the beast was first. He had the sense to trust it, listen to it, and then the sense to also trust something else, something higher. In effect in gilding the beast he was making the lily.

Charles Seliger would have surprised most people with his powerful emotions and longings and passions, all of which ran to great heights and depths. How could they know this about this resolutely modest, polite, kind, gracious, and erudite man. But his paintings told the story, and for those who could listen, it was all right there. Find the beast in his paintings and you find their roots; there is the place to look first. It is easy to get dazzled and lost in the leaves that reach for the sky, but what is so fascinating about the work is where it starts!

Every single one of Charles Seliger's painting began as the fierce beast. A vital, earthly, virile/fertile, ecstatic, excitable beast that he set about not just taming, but elevating. This was his lifelong challenge. Charles Seliger had a vision. He looked at his life and the life around him and he figured out that a life like Jackson Pollock's might burn bright, but also burn fast, too fast. Charles knew Pollock, showed with Pollock. Pollock was a cautionary tale if there ever was one, and Charles got the message. I know this because I got the same message and followed his lead.

No, Charles Seliger was in it for the long haul. He rolled the dice. He gambled that if he laid down a stable life, he could paint for a very long time and that that would allow him to paint a life's work and climb all the way to the stars. He knew that what he wanted to accomplish would take a lot of time and a very long time. What he would sacrifice in immediate career gratification was nothing compared to the loftier and more far reaching ambitions he had for himself and his work. So he left New York City, the art metropolis, and moved out to Mount Vernon and got down to the business of life and art, in that order!

Now when we think of people who work with beasts, we think of lion-tamers and cowboys who break horses. But Charles was much more than that. Charles was like something extraordinary from C. S. Lewis. He was like Aslan, the lion god, and his Narnia! Charles Seliger's beasts were full-fledged ones, larger than life and straight from some primordial ooze. And like the artist he was, he shaped them, and tamed them, yes, but more importantly he didn't just make sure that he didn't break their spirits, he sang the song like Aslan that raised their spirits, that made theirs shine bright and soar the heavens! Seliger painted amazing paintings that no size could contain. He carried the first-hand lessons of Surrealism and automatic and then all-over-painting through his sixty-five years of work to produce vast but small paintings that encompassed at once the void and the great expanse. Each one the song of life; life beyond any space we can imagine, inner or outer, each one a song of life like we have never heard, of paradise and perfection. Each one a great burst of imagination and spirit.

Trust me, other artists aren't doing this. What they are doing is more like basic plumbing. What Charles Seliger did he accomplished at a little easel in his upstairs bedroom at night. Always inspired. Hugely prolific. Small paintings, yes, but he had the wisdom to appreciate that a little Charles Seliger could go a long way. With each painting he acted out his own story; with each painting he performed his own metamorphosis from base to precious metal--the alchemy of caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation. Yes, this was it. Charles Seliger was making butterflies! See this, perhaps with the caterpillar instead of beast, if you prefer, and you see his paintings! It is this process that really tells the story. It is the process he wants you to experience, unconsciously.

Charles Seliger was a man of small stature with a giant trapped inside that through determined devotion became a higher being; a mild-mannered Clark Kent turned Superman the great artist. This was his path, this was his struggle, this was his dream. His paintings, every single one of them, tell the story of something wild and free, something completely irrational on one level, that evolves stroke by stroke into something beautiful, something divine, something made of love and goodness and light, that in the end couldn't be more reasonable, as reasonable as the man himself.

Charles Seliger made small paintings. He didn't have to, although from a practical point of view they served his purposes. No, they were a concerted effort to check the beast. The small canvas reeled him in, disciplined him as he so disciplined himself, kept him from flying too close to the sun. No, he had even bigger fish to fry. He wasn't playing for glory or even immortality, he was playing for the divine, the holy, the unattainable, the wholey spiritual, the face of God. The company of God. They always talk about heaven having a hell of a band, but most artists are bound for purgatory. Charles kept his head down. I think he got what he wanted. His paintings were too good for this earth. And our loss is heaven's gain.

Addison Parks




-- Post From My iPhone

Expanding Kandinsky

Perception is a funny thing. Most of the time we would rather not think about it. Disturbing. Demanding. Destabilizing. One good way to recognize how it changes, and that it does change, is to think about age; if you're 10 years old then 30 seems incredibly old, and then when you're 50, it seems even more incredibly young. Our perceptions change so fast and all the time, and most of the time we don't have a clue.

Take the Kandinsky show at the Guggenhiem. It could be too much. Hard to believe, but it could be. You have a hard time taking it in. Too many people, too many paintings. Nevermind that you're on a bias, slanting up or down, going up or down hill. The problem of looking at painting in the Guggenhiem is legend. The best thing about it is the worst; you can see a lot of paintings at once. You can't take them in in that one at a time way some museums offer, each painting a private viewing experience up close and personal, bread crumbs on the way to a greater understanding of art or artist.

Instead what we really get is like peering from the rim of the Grand Canyon, and then slogging down the designated path. It is totally linear, no bouncing around from gallery to gallery, but instead a gauntlet of art, at arms length, like standing in so many little swimming pools, leaning, one leg shorter than the other, weight always on your right leg, the way that they say that the leg you favor will lead you in circles in the desert. Circles and circles of art. Circles and circles of Kandinsky. Dizzying. And that is what I was left with, more than experiencing any one painting, it was the cumulative experience. It was seeing a coil of them from across the way, exponentially, the trail of abstraction spiraling through space, a strand of colors and shapes and marks from the balcony of the opposite side, taking it in the way an emperor must have gazed upon his empire, a presidium, a sum, an expanse. Expanding Kandinsky.

That is Frank Lloyd Wright's gift. An altered perception; seeing painting a way you're never seen it before, for better and for worse.

What did I get out of the actual work this time? In particular? It was how often Kandinsky used black to nail a painting down, to complete it, to resolve it, to bring it to fruition. The opposite kind of metamorphosis of the butterfly in one sense, but in the end the results are the same: they fly! Abstract color and shape float across the picture plane as free as the wind, like colored clouds and leaves floating softly down a summer's breeze; and then black is applied like a kind of clamp to hold it all in place. Quite remarkable. If not a little disappointing.

What else? Around 1923 Kandinsky used a compass to make his circles. There are holes in their centers. Surprising. Apparently he abandoned the practice shortly thereafter.

And just a reminder: he started his career as a lawyer. He was also Russian, spent half his life in Germany, moving to France to escape the Nazis in 1933, enjoying his last five years as a French citizen. How his perceptions must have changed. Communism, the Nazis, Paris, and the rise of a New York art world. Blue Rider to Bauhaus, brioches and Broadway.

Even though the endless parade of paintings exercised a gravitational pull down the long and winding rows that was something like a slow motion drive by shooting of canvas and paint, again it was the view of Kandinsky that will stay with me: the windows of color and light across the way, not just the spiritual in art, but what I imagine is the powerful Russian folk spirit that was the heart and soul of so many artists that emerged from that part of the world at that time.

They all shared that sweetness with the rest of us, and in that way that sharing is showing, showed us another way to live, to perceive life, to celebrate life. They brought their culture through art, through painting and literature and music, and enriched our lives. Kandinsky abstracted that for us. Literally. He was just painting maps. Directions to a beautiful place he once knew.


-- Post From My iPhone