Robert Lobe

Imagine the sound - being in a deep forest and hearing the clink, clink, clink, of hammer on metal.  Only a hundred years ago it wouldn't have been so unfamiliar as smiths and masons did their work.  Imagine the sight - coming across a figure, bent over a rock or standing next to a tree and hammering over it a gleaming sheet of metal.  It's an image elfish and folkloric, yet the reality is neither.  The figure is Robert Lobe, the metal is aluminum, and the work he's engaged in is making sculpture.  Lobe's technique is a type of repousse, but rather than hammering thin sheets of metal into the hollow of a form, he hammers around rocks and trees.  Lobe leaves the marks of the tools and hammer to mimic the textures of bark and stone.  Even when using the percussive force of pneumatic equipment, the intensity of the time and closeness to the subject turns the labor from the power of hammer blows into the love of a caress.  In their tenderness and individuality the sculptures approach the character of portraits.  

Rocks and trees are among the small collection of landscape elements which form the bases of almost all figurative sculpture from the Greeks through the early Twentieth century when the base began to be considered old fashioned and unnecessary, and gradually disappeared in sculpture considered to be modern.  This little bit of landscape defined the territory of the figure above and declared, now you're in my world, now you're in the presence of art.  If one is familiar with this history there is enough similarity to the accustomed landscape of bases in Lobe's sculpture that an echo is produced and the absence of a figure becomes a noticeable one.  It isn't that every one of Lobe's sculptures is identifiable with another from history that has a figure.  The feeling that something is missing is more teasing and general than that.  Lobe gives a nod towards the figure in Bacchus at the Leap.  He's hammered in the god's attributes of grapes onto the rock, but where is Bacchus at Bacchus at the Leap? 

Gray, a forest of gray.  The color of winter, of leafless trees in rain, and granite.  Leaves are to a tree as color is to sculpture - distractions that interfere with the clarity of the more fundamental quality of structure, the bones of both tree and sculpture.  What gives sculpture its structure are its physical qualities, the thrust and concentration of its mass and volume.  For trees its their enduring elements of trunk and limbs.  For the most part Lobe dispenses with the distractions and leaves his work both leafless and the silver-gray of the aluminum, concentrating our attention on the light and shadow which molds and defines them.  When he does add leaves its only a small sprig.  When the sculptor Alberto Giacometti made the tree for the first production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot he placed on it a single leaf.  The effect was a tragicomic absurdity that was fitting for the play.  We know that Lobe's leaves aren't the result of hammering and they look stuck on, like a sentimental afterthought.  So full and resonant are his sculptures already, the leaves don't add anything .  Like the absence of a figure, were the leaves not included they would still be there as an absent presence.

Far from being the sublime and heroic landscape forms of art and imagination, Lobe's sculptures   have the character of memorials.  They cease to fulfill the expectations for landscape, especially those of an American landscape.  For truly no landscape has been viewed as heroically and imbued with so much of a nation's aspirations and personae as has the American, particularly that of the Northeast United States where Lobe lives and works.  This is the territory of the painters of the Hudson River School, the birth site of the vision and aesthetic of the American Landscape.  From here came not only the artists and writers of the aesthetic, but the consciousness that led to the founding of the National Park System beginning with Yellowstone in 1872 - the world's first national park.

What makes Lobe carry his sheets of aluminum out into the forest to pound over rocks and trees?

The reason for this is probably the same as for the continuing success and necessity of his sculpture even though relatively unchanged for thirty years.  "Men must retire from the world from time to time" the German author Goethe wrote, "for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best."  The site of that retreat and awakening is the wilderness - desert, ocean, but very often forest.  It lies deep in our arboreal ancestry, a memory of which is stirred by Lobe's sculpture. 

Brian Jungen

Alongside the towering motifs of Fetishization, Commercialism, Globalization and Transformation with which Brian Jungen's work is concerned, Loss stands off in a corner like a young child.  Call it the Loss of Splendor.  Mainly it's that of Aboriginal culture - to stereotypes, to jail, to alcoholism - but also of the natural world, and those of art and architecture.  The way loss is revealed is what makes Jungen a difficult artist - not because his work is difficult, but because it's difficult to know if it should be liked at all.  No, liked is the wrong word.  His work is impossible not to like because it's inventive, clever, well crafted and visually splendid.  The word is endorsed.   

The story of the catapult of Brian Jungen's success as an artist is becoming as well worn and as much a part of legend as the characters he represents in his series of sculptures that stand at the beginning of it.  In 1998, Jungen saw something in the colors of Nike Air Jordan shoes that probably hadn't been intended by Nike, or seen by anyone else.  Jungen took the shoes apart, and using the red, black and white of the shoes as a guide, restitched them to create Prototypes for New Understanding - remarkable representations of Northwest Coast Aboriginal masks.  Together with the Prototypes, Jungen is best known for another ongoing series of sculpture - the whale skeletons Shapeshifter, Cetology, and Vienna, the bones of magnificent creatures reduced to reproduction using plastic chairs.

The meshing of images and materials in sometimes uneasy combinations is intended as a critical comment and analysis, but it comes at a price.  In part these series are a reflection of ethnographic and natural history museums, but they also cast the disturbing shadow of trading post and souvenir shop - the trinkets and knockoffs made for a tourist market.  The shapes are right, but the materials are wrong - wrong in the sense that they demean their source.  There is something disturbing about an Aboriginal mask made of shoes and a whale skeleton made of plastic.  Are there things in this world that should be respected and left alone?  Should there be a moral imperative, a responsibility, not to act?  As laudatory as Jungen's ambition to confront difficult issues is, does his work alleviate or contribute to the problems?  Should he care?  

Being censorious are we getting it all wrong and overlooking the humor, missing the joke, that Jungen, and many writers on Jungen, call attention to?  Jungen's background is Swiss and Aboriginal, and according to Ojibwa writer Drew Hayden Taylor's new book Me Funny, permitted disrespect is characteristic of Aboriginal humor, especially teasing and self-deprecation.  Even so, the intention of making, or appearing to make, a joke can also be expressly to avoid censor, a defensive behavior to defuse criticism.  As a Jew, I understand the rules for telling racist jokes and I know self-deprecating humor - still, there are certain objects and symbols that I wouldn't disrespect.  There is a nuance here between something which is verbal and something which is physical, and it's what makes Jungen not so funny.  Jungen isn't telling jokes, he's making objects, and a verbal assault is very different than a physical one as the "sticks and stones" of children's rhyme teaches.  As a witness, the decline of a culture, like the loss of uniqueness because of globalization, is no joke.

After the thrill, these are frictions that animate Jungen's best work.  The sad irony is that the farther his work gets from the friction, the more it risks a bland conceptualism like Michael -reproductions of Air Jordan shoe boxes made in aluminum - and Modern Sculpture - silver soccer balls sewn together into biomorphic shapes and filled with lava rock.  In Guernica, Picasso could comment on the horrors of war without at the same time being complicit or even seeming to be, and still produce a  moving and provocative work of art.  Is the same possible for Jungen or is the greatest loss the impossibility of doing so? 

  

   

The Secret Life of Art: Piotr Nathan's How Far Do You Dare To Go

There is that portion of a life which is presented to the world and seen, and that other portion, the secret life, which is cloaked, known only to whose life it is and perhaps a select group.  What constitutes this secret life can run from the mundane to the extreme, but everybody has one. 

If you haven't been to the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC to see Piotr Nathan's How Far Do You Dare To Go, go while there's still time before the show closes on December 4th.  Not only is the Belkin one of Vancouver's best designed spaces in which to see art, but it now offers the first Canadian exhibition of an artist well known in Europe and the United States.  Covering the past ten years, the work is rich, and varied, and fascinating, with imagery that runs from natural history to homosexual sadomasochism.  The Secret Life and The Crystal Metaphor are the links of this diversity.

The Garment of a Fleeting Notion is a small vitrine inside of which a large glop of brilliant red oil paint rests atop a copy of the illustration of an iceberg which Nathan used for his series of five paintings Notes on the Future Becoming the Past.  The paint is like a little iceberg of its own, amplifying the notion that what is seen on the surface of ocean or painting is only a fraction of what lies below.  Ninety percent of an iceberg is below the water's surface, submerged below sight and consciousness.  This is the hidden mystery of the iceberg, the iceberg's secret life.  The iceberg is a perfect metaphor for art.  The portion of art which is seen is analogous to what's above, its metaphor, the vastness of its meaning  is what is unseen below.  It's this below, in the secret communication that each person shares with a piece of art beyond the intention, desire, and control of the artist that constitutes the secret life of art.        

An iceberg is a crystallized form.  One which turns water from a common element into something imposing and magnificent.  This is one of the main themes of the Crystal Metaphor - the transmutation of base matter - like water, or paint.  Rituals of Disappearance is an allegorical representation of the four elements transformed from the ordinary to the sublime:  earth to dust storm, air to Northern Lights, water to waterspout, fire to volcanic eruption.  Taken from wood engravings from a nineteenth century work on natural history, Nathan has enlarged and traced them directly onto square aluminum panels.  As presented, the picture has been crystalized into regular units and shattered into a grid.  The indication is that the quality of the experience - of the pictures' former meaning and the experiences represented - has been transformed.  

In the lush and colorful painting Margarethe's Treasure Chest two caves lie side by side.  They meet in a common interior filled with crystals and geodes of all type and color.  On the right is the Blue Grotto of Capri, on the left the Scottish Fingal's Cave formed of columns of basalt.  A pair of small figures appear in each.  They're looking at the caves, but outwards towards sky and light, missing the real treasure which lies unseen in the chamber behind them in which we imaginatively stand.  With the high domed ceiling and dual sockets there's an unmistakable impression of being on the inside of a skull, standing amongst the riches of the mind, looking out.  The figures are turned away from this - another example of the secret life - seeing only surfaces.

First published in The Vancouver Courier

The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968 - 1993

Even if you don't already know the photography of Stephen Shore, entering Presentation House gives the uncanny feeling of familiarity. It looks like Shore looks like everyone else.  The fact is, he got there first, and The Biographical Landscape:  The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968 - 1993 shows many of the still dominant trends in contemporary photography that Shore helped to define, including the reflection of some of Vancouver's best known photographers.  Why "biographical"?  

The answer begins in American Surfaces.  In the early 1970s Shore headed West from New York to Amarillo, Texas.  Using a 35 mm camera, color film, and a snapshot aesthetic he produced a photographic diary of the adventure.  The pictures are autobiographic.  Like a photo album they tell a story, the story of his first trip across country.  They also develop a subject matter and pattern of working that he would refine and enlarge upon in Uncommon Places, Shore's essential series on the American vernacular landscape and the focus of the exhibition.

From 1973 to 1982 Shore crisscrossed the United States and Canada taking color photographs of everyday scenes.  For reasons not explained, he switched from the ease and portability of a 35 mm camera to large format cameras - the kind with accordion bodies - that require a tripod. Because of their size and the nature of their operation, use of large format cameras contributes to clarity of image at the same time they preclude the possibility of spontaneous picture taking.  What Shore lost in the snapshot aesthetic, he gained in crisp detail and forthrightness of composition.  Like American Surfaces, Uncommon Places is a record of what Shore encountered - the places he saw, the people he met, the motel beds he slept in, the meals he ate.  But it's more than that.  They're how Americans see themselves as Americans.  More still - they're how they fondly remember themselves because for many it's a vision of America that's never been known firsthand, known in no other way, but photographs or stories.  Looking at the photographs we realize they're iconic images.  This is the moment when the landscape becomes "biographical" in a way more significant than photography's ordinary subjectivity because the feeling isn't "this is my experience of the landscape", but "this is my landscape".  The feeling of ownership is concrete.  What starts as autobiography becomes biography at the moment I recognize the images as mine.  It's no longer Shore's story he's telling, it's my story, and your story, and the story of everyone for whom the photographs become "mine".  When a thing is owned so personally by so many it becomes iconic.      

How does Shore make me claim his landscape for my own?  First, through a combination of subject, classicism of composition, and quality of light the pictures induce an experience of solitude which makes the moment of their taking seem quiet and unshared.  Next, looking at any photograph you imaginatively replace the photographer.  When there's no person in the photograph as in many of Shore's, you become the only one present when the photograph was taken.  With that realization you own that moment held by the photograph and whatever is represented in it in a very particular, and I'd say particularly American way.  Americans own differently than other people.  It has to do with a form of proprietariness based on a distinct feeling of ownership of private property.  Absent of anyone else the landscape and everything in it becomes ours in a way that makes it proper to say that it was Stephen Shore's landscape, just as it becomes ours in our moment of viewing.  We are inclined to say along with Ralph Waldo Emerson that, There is no history, only biography.

First published in The Vancouver Courier

After the Disasteroid

After the Disasteroid



Here was a qualified Nothing, a Nothing of such
deep despair, I could not be absolved of my
aesthetic responsibility - a nonhope Nothing, a
non Nothing - and yet, also before my eyes was
the evidence of a dedication to artistic expression
so unyieldingly vast in its implications that my
mind - at least at first - bluntly refused to accept
the evidence.

Charles Willeford, The Burnt Orange Heresy


Some look around and see the triumph of the ages.
The same prospect can as easily offer a view of
the debacle of time. It all depends on who you're
rooting for.

Anonymous sightseer at the Grand Canyon


The physical landscape is a language of mounds, depressions and meanders that can be read as a series of dramas, comedies and tragedies not unlike the artistic landscape. Geologist and art critic become fellow excavators searching their respective topographies for clues to their formation. Deformation of these landscapes is common, the result of powerful, often hidden forces.

While on a recent trip to the Grand Canyon, standing at the rim looking into a popular section called the Abyss, my mind drifted to Robert Smithson and his essay An Esthetics of Disappointment, "Futility, one of the more durable things of this world is nearer to the artistic experience than excitement. Yet, the life-forcer is always around trying to incite a fake madness. The mind is important, but only when it is empty. The greater the emptiness the grander the art." I yelled this into the Canyon, but the echo came back as the words of Lancelot Law Whyte in The Next Development of Man, "To think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the processes of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become." From between Smithson and Whyte it occurred to me that perhaps the entropy which preoccupied Smithson and of which he was so enamoured had finally engulfed the art world. It wasn't the rundown of energy, but of belief in art as capable of doing or meaning. The extinction of the belief in art, if not art, had become complete and with it came the end of authenticity. The unfortunate thing for authenticity and for all late coming artists is that in the 1970's as the last of the magnificent dinosaurs roamed the art world a disasteroid of terrible proportions struck causing an earthquake that opened a chasm between the artist, and authenticity and belief. As authenticity and belief receded, self-consciousness oozed forwards to take its place. Truly, self-consciousness, failure and impotence have always been present in the history of art, but before the disasteroid there was still the possibility of also making an authentic gesture. In De Kooning's work it is possible to see when self-consciousness first leaked in. The moment comes early in his abstract career. Very suddenly the bold and confident brushstroke became a stroke with pause.

After the disasteroid inner world was replaced irrevocably by "inner world" and the utopian, transcendent, and utilitarian aspirations of art were exiled to a lost world. As a result it is just too simple for the artist to wake up in the morning and decide that, "today I'll be an abstract expressionist," and the next morning, "today I'll be a minimalist." Without conviction, artists developed commitment without duration. Though a jejune example, something that might be found in a block of text by Sean Landers, it is as easy and as hollow for the artist to change styles as it is to change socks. Most artists continue to make art ignoring this loss or unaware that the rug has been pulled out from under them, or in a doomed attempt to turn back the clock. Some artists, however, make it the unavoidable motive or motif of their work. The background of these artists is the Modern Dilemma of the artist wanting to continue, but not being able to continue and continuing anyway. Self-consciousness is the grand concept. Failure and impotence are subsumed under it - I think therefore I cannot. The only authentic gesture left to them is the authenticity of their self-consciousness and to make that the catalyst of their work. In an odd way the self-conscious mark is the only mark that can be made authentically. All others can be faked. It's possible to make an expressionist painting with no feeling. It's possible to make a minimalist sculpture while being a romantic maximalist. It's possible to make propaganda without caring. But it is impossible to make any self-conscious gesture without being aware of both the gesture and the self. The prototypic artist of self-consciousness, failure and impotence is the fictional painter Jacques Debierue of Charles Willeford's Burnt Orange Heresy. Unlike Debierue who sat daily in futility waiting for an idea that never came these artists don't just sit around waiting. Theirs is an active rather than a paralyzing impotence, a sense rather than a fact. Though this is not an easy position to be in they are using it to make interesting art.

While lost in these reveries a storm blew in. Huddled against the rain with the pygmy pinon and juniper trees that grow on the rim I watched the Canyon change color as the soil soaked up water and turned to mud. Soon miniature mud flows, and slumps, and avalanches began. Their frequency increased until the entire side of the Canyon looked as if it were sliding into the river below. With this abundance of moisture and motion I naturally began to think of painting. In particular the painting of Julian Schnabel.

It's all like a movie: the outfits, the
surfboards, the picture perfect wife, the rustic
house, the giant open-air studio, the barefoot
children. What does it mean to try to be an
artist, even a great artist (I'm as close to
Picasso as you're going to get in this fucking
life," Schnabel has said), in a time when
people think in cinematic rather than painterly
terms when, in fact, almost everyone is far
more interested in movies than in painting?

James Kaplan, from "Lives of the Artists", New York Magazine 12.August.1996.


In James Kaplan's essay on Schnabel he asks the right question - the crucial question as far as Schnabel is concerned - but never answers it. What does it mean to try to be an artist? Whether people are thinking in cinematic, painterly or any other terms is irrelevant. The question is simply, What does it mean to Julian Schnabel to try and be an artist? His entire career is an answer to this question; failure. This isn't to say that Schnabel is a bad painter or an uninteresting artist. Undeniably a strong painter, he can move it around with the best of them, but that has nothing to do with what makes him significant or interesting. Schnabel is absolutely right when he says that he's as close to Picasso as you're going to get in this life. It's impossible for him to get close because it's impossible for anybody to get closer. It is, in fact, impossible to get very close at all. The gap that separates all contemporary artist's from Picasso, or from any of the other strong precursors (Guston and Pollock in Schnabel's case), is the swamp of self-consciousness into which authenticity has vanished. Bubbling up from its depths are the twin miasmic plumes of failure and impotence. Getting across is a donnered expedition that Schnabel never tires of. He seems entirely devoted to the impossible task of recapturing the Modernist myths that cripple generation after generation of succeeding artists, and the belief in art that accompanied and supported those myths. The massive and aggressive use of paint and materials that Schnabel employs no longer signifies the expression of the artist's authentic inner world as it did for his strong precursors, but rather only an overwhelming desire and dedication to paint. It is precisely the earnestness of the attempt and the monumentality of Schnabel's failure to recapture anything that constitutes his grandness.

As with most forms of description, the classification of self-consciousness, failure and impotence contains a fundamental dualism; in this case the classic Cartesian split of mind and body. There is then Failure of the Body and Failure of the Mind, or in other words Gestural and Conceptual Failure. Schnabel's work is an example of Failure of the Body; Jonathan Lasker's, Failure of the Mind.

What does a painter paint when there's nothing left to paint? What to do with desire and ambition? For Lasker, it looks like paint the paint and paint the painting of paint. Ground. Figure. Line. There's supposed to be a ground, there is ground. There's supposed to be a figure, there is figure. Then there's the line. A line that goes nowhere and describes nothing, but a dedication to painting frustrated by self-consciousness, failure and impotence. With no emotion, no passion, no action the line is slow, and deliberate, and dumb. The kind of noodling line one makes while passing time waiting for an idea. Even so, Lasker's work distinguishes itself as Conceptual Failure as distinct from the Gestural Failure of Schnabel in its clear lack of painterliness. The self-consciousness of the gesture is so complete that the gesture disappears, revealing the mind behind it.

"Language" and "doodle" are the most frequently used terms to describe Lasker's work. Formal language is pitted against formal language until a series of civil wars is produced that leaves the viewer a witness to a visual babble. More entertaining would be to think in terms of All Star Wrestling. The result, if a language, is one which has been emptied of content. It's an absurd language. If I have to think of a Lasker as language I prefer to look at the blank spaces between the letters from which another Lasker is waiting to emerge.


And Watt's need of semantic succor
was at times so great that he would
set to trying names on things, and on
himself, almost as a woman hats.

Samuel Beckett, Watt.


The first time I read this I was reminded of the work of René Magritte. I'm thinking of those paintings like Swift Hope, The Living Mirror, and The Tree of Knowledge, which show abstract shapes apparently labeled, at least associated with, words or phrases such as: cloud, horse, leaden road, figure bursting out laughing, or bird calls, as well as paintings like Dream Key that depict recognizable objects together with words which are associated, but not descriptive of the objects. With the paintings of Lasker the passage echoes to mind once again.

Magritte's abstract shapes are just that, abstract shapes. Their relationship to the accompanying text seems gratuitous at best, a simple trying on of hats that illustrates the tenuousness of meaning, the impotence or words to describe, and the failure of language to communicate. With Lasker on the other hand though there may be an idea behind the image as he asserts, the language that would help prop up that idea has abandoned the image. The image is stranded. Left alone to fend for itself. And it's not talking. Why should it? After all, Lasker's a painter, he's not a postman.

More so than the paintings themselves, it's their titling that shows the affinity that exists between Magritte and Lasker. But whereas Magritte's use of titles is surreal, Lasker seems to really want to say something. There is in Lasker an overwhelming commitment to content and meaning. He says it, it is said about him, and it is clearly read in his titling of paintings.

As with all artists of self-consciousness, Lasker's paintings are portraits. Portraits of the artist as ambiguous figure. As absurd gesture. As subversive mark. As antithetical language. Lasker is that deliberate meandering line that more frequently than not is the last mark added to a painting. The gesture sits on top of and suppresses all the preceding languages of paint. He is the last word. The finishing stroke. The final kick in the pants.

Follow Lasker's line that goes nowhere far enough and you end up on a patch of highway by Michael Ashkin, another artist of Conceptual Failure. Ashkin's sculpture shows the empty, desolate, entropic landscapes that so absorbed Robert Smithson: construction and industrial sites, pipelines, parking lots, abandoned vehicles, and high voltage lines - the heroicism of landscape and progress eroded by a deluge of failure. In many of the works there is a marked resemblance to the Monuments of Passic. Like Smithson, one expects Ashkin to be a proponent of J.G.Ballard's dystopic aesthetic: the "beauty of the car crash, excitements of the deserted holiday beach, elegance of automobile graveyards, mystery of multi-storey car parks, and poetry of abandoned hotels."

Most frequently featuring highways which are commonly thought of as conduits of travel or direction, these highways are failed. Rather than a way to someplace they are roads to no place. One can imagine Tony Smith on his famous midnight ride that helped pave the way for the development of art as place and the experience of art as journey. Instead of helping to remember where you have been they make you forget where you are going, leaving you on a lost highway. These are the side roads and disused state and county roads, the access roads and service roads good for dumping and joy riding and the romantic notion of driving across country on the scenic route of an America that doesn't exist anymore.

Overall, the work of Michael Ashkin seems to ask where there is to go. By the looks of his sculpture the answer is nowhere. With no beginning and no end the artist is stuck in the middle, cut off in both directions and stranded on a fragment of highway. Ashkin's sculpture No. 60 is a good example. An isolated section of highway and an isolated section of land are separated and surrounded by murky, milky, "water" that has a toxic look. I hedge to call the land an island because it and the highway are the same size and in the past the scale in Ashkin's work has been consistent. They lie in a straight line with one another. An equivalence is being make, similar perhaps to Ballard's Concrete Island. Like Robert Maitland the story's protagonist, in the present climate, surrounded by self-consciousness and buffeted by failure and impotence, the artist is marooned beside a lost highway on an island that time forgot.


Debierue was a slave to hope. He had
never accepted the fact that he couldn't
paint a picture. But each day he faced
the slavery of the attempt to paint, and#
the subsequent daily failure. After each
day of failure he was destroyed, only to
be reborn on the next day - each new day
bringing with it a new chance, a new
opportunity. How could he be so strong
willed to face this daily death, this vain
slavery to hope? He had dedicated
his life to Nothing.

Charles Willeford, The Burnt Orange Heresy


More so than any of the others, Sean Landers is most obviously an artist of self-consciousness, failure and impotence. Discernible in almost all of his work, they are absolutely unavoidable in his text pieces. Like Lasker and Ashkin, Landers is an artist of Conceptual Failure. But whereas Schnabel, Lasker and Ashkin might confront their situation, Landers wallows in it. Even "inner voice" has been so skewed that it almost returns to its pre quotation mark state. By transcribing it, Landers reveals the tectonics which have formed and deformed him. Coming later than the others he has the most to lose because he has the least to work with. Even so, he continues. His hope and desire and dedication may be as great as those that came before, but he has even less place to go; authenticity and belief have receded further still. But he goes on.

The text works like Self-Something are like small, brightly colored jaw breakers. Sucking from layer to layer, the color changes as the text teeter totters from authenticity (blue) to self-consciousness (green) to delusions of grandeur (red) to impotence (white) and on and on until it dissolves and nothing is left, but to pick up another and start again. In the text and landscape works there are mountains of failure, seas of self-consciousness. Stand in front of a Landers long enough and the whole thing dissolves leaving the epic emptiness that Landers so persistently addresses.

In the November-December 1997 issue of Flash Art Wolf-Gunter Thiel developed the category of Synthetic Abstraction and the centrality of artificiality or simulation to it. Artificiality and simulation are germane to self-consciousness, failure and impotence too, but I would differ with Thiel and say that the history of art is not the history of simulation, but of failure. Every simulation is a tacit acknowledgment of both failure and secondariness. The recognition of being too late and therefore unable to recapture what has come before, results inevitably in the self-consciousness from which failure and impotence spring.

When the storm cleared I was once again at the rim of the Abyss. Directly across I could make out the layers of rock of the opposite wall; from the 1.7 billion year old Vishnu Schist to the pale caprock Kaibab Limestone deposited 250 million years ago, to the 1 million year old black lava flows, and onto the mud that covered my shoes. Nearly half the earth's 4.6 billion year history was on display there. It took a mere 4 to 6 million years to cut through it. The 6,000 foot deep, 10 mile wide gorge that is Grand Canyon is the result of the inability of materials to withstand the lapping assault of the Colorado River and maintain their physical integrity. Even the Grand Canyon is an epic monument to the grandness of Failure.



Dion Kliner New York 1998
First published in Flash Art, Summer Issue, Vol. XXXI, number 201.

A Tale of Two Spheres

A Tale of Two Spheres
Seeing is Believing: 700 Year of Scientific and Medical Illustration.


Everything which I have thus far accepted as entirely true and assured has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. But I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those things which have once deceived us.
Rene Descartes, Philosophical Essays, First Meditation, Concerning Things That Can Be Doubted.


On the first snowy day of the year, while on the subway to the New York Public Library's exhibition Seeing Is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration, I began thinking of the relationship between image and text, and the jejune aphorism a picture's worth a thousand words slowly floated into my head. No matter how hackneyed, when it comes to the phenomenal world, it's one thing to write about the inner workings of the human body, or what a flea looks like up close, or the order of strata in a geologic formation, but to see a rendering or a photograph is to understand it more deeply, more quickly. And as in the classic example of trying to describe the color blue to someone who's never seen it, sometimes there is no substitute.

One of the stated subjects of Seeing Is Believing is the importance of illustration in the progress of science. To convey this, the New York Public Library has brought together hundreds of artifacts covering the 13th through the beginning of the 20th century from the four research centers of the Library's vast collections, as well as materials loaned from The New York Academy of Medicine. Beginning with a section entitled Medieval Worldview, further division is made not chronologically, but by field: Natural History, Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Illustration Processes - an informative section detailing many of the methods seen throughout. What is made clear is that illustration and science were roped together like mountaineers during their parallel development. The move from a style of drawing that could be described as speculative and decorative to one more factual and descriptive coincided with the development of knowledge from anecdotally based evidence to evidence based on direct observation and experimentation during the mid-16th century.

Wandering slowly from field to field in the subdued lighting, case after glass case presents itself filled with books each open to a page that includes an illustration. They're all here. All the luminaries of Western science, and some not as well known: the work of Andreas Vesalius, who in 1543 established the process of direct observation for human anatomy; John James Audubon's color-plate "Iceland or Jer Falcon" from The Birds of America (1860-61) is perched near Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology: being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation (1830-33), one of the first arguments in favor of the principle of gradual change over that of catastrophic change - the effect is seismic; and of course Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).

Less familiar, and the more interesting for being so, is a woodcut from Dell'historia naturale (1599) considered the first printed illustration of the precursor of the modern museum: several men stand in the library of the pharmacist Ferrante Imperato, a room filled with shelves of books. Every other surface is covered with specimens representing all the phyla, the ceiling dominated by a large crocodile which hangs above their heads. Next to Dell'historia naturale is Robert Hooke's giant engraving of a flea from Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665), the first book devoted to reproductions of microscopical observations.

In a case of its own is Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-53), a book containing the work of Anna Atkins, the first woman photographer. Nearby are albumen print photographs by Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne from Mecanisme de la Physionomie humaine, ou analyse electrophysiologique de l'expression des passions...(1876) in which Duchenne hooked electrodes to his subjects' faces to deliver an electric current that would trace the neurological paths in the muscles that produce expressions of emotion.

Halfway through the exhibition I realize how much time has passed and how little I mind. The room has become crowded yet remains strangely quiet. We seem to have become hypnotized by the worlds being presented. A docent steps near with her group and points out a work of Louis Pasteur containing a wood engraving of the first X-ray image of a full skeleton by William Konrad Rontgen from 1896. I move on and find Marie Sklodowska Curie's Rescherches sur les substances radioactives (1904), a halftone photograph showing the effects of beta and gamma rays through nonmetallic substances, and Henry Honeychurch Gorringe's Egyptian Obelisks with photographs detailing how he erected the obelisk outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park. Close by, a single case has made strange bedfellows of Sir Issac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) and Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland (1884) a geometric Alice in Wonderland. Towards the end I find an illustration and a name that have long captivated me. The image is an engraving showing the direct relationship between the number, size, and arrangement of the planetary orbits and the five regular geometric solids is from The Cosmographic Mystery (1596) the first published work of Johannes Kepler. The name is Galileo Galilei whose The Starry Messenger (1653) is opened to an engraving of the Pleiades.

There are a lot of firsts in Seeing Is Believing even if they aren't all first editions. These are powerful, moving documents not for the advance in empirical knowledge or scientific method that they represent, but for what they say about the human spirit and the strength of individual thought. It is impossible to look at Galileo, for instance, and not think of his trials before the Inquisition. For some of these early scientists the risk wasn't a question of success or failure, it was a matter of life and death.


A Tale of Two Spheres

Three illustrations summarize and characterize the trajectory of the long and varied relationship of seeing and believing which is stated so emphatically in the title. Entering the exhibition, the first display contains a manuscript of Joannes de Sacro Bosco, Comptus, quadrans, de sphaera algorismus (1275) showing an illustration of the Medieval cosmos hand-painted and illuminated on vellum. Just two cases and 20 feet away, but separated by a gulf of unfathomable dimensions, is Nicolaus Copernicus' On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) with a simple woodcut of the most famed illustration of Western science. Graphically similar, these two diagrams demonstrate the deceptively simple power of illustration. Each composed of a sphere ringed by concentric circles, the first shows the Earth at the center of the universe. The second has the sun in this central position. Erase the text from both books, leaving only these two illustrations, and the earthshaking effect would be the same. The shift from a world defined by what we believe to one defined by what we see is radically there.

Notwithstanding the philosophical skepticism of Descartes and others like him, at one time - during which Copernicus drew his version of the spheres and for centuries afterwards - seeing was believing. Before and after the relationship has been more strained. In a side case of the Medieval Worldview is an anonymous book titled Antichrist (1482) with a hand-colored woodcut which is probably the earliest illustration of a Cesarean section. Demons attend the birth. It didn't matter that demons had probably never been seen. For a long time it didn't matter what we saw. We didn't believe our eyes because we believed even more strongly that there were overwhelming powers, like the Devil, that could play tricks on our eyes and deceive us.

Since the late 19th century, our manipulation of the processes of illustration has become more skillful. What began with staged and doctored photographs and developed into film clips of UFOs, has become computer generated images and a movie like Wag the Dog where a whole fictional conflict is created by a Hollywood producer. After 700 years of the development of trust in direct observation, we are beginning once again to doubt what we see. We still believe that there are overwhelming powers out there to deceive us, but they have been secularized into the powers of Government, Big Business, Advertising, and the Media.

By the time I emerged from the library back onto 42nd and 5th Avenue, the snow had begun to drift as had my thoughts, through 700 years of staggering human achievement. Passing the stone lions that flank the main entrance, I overheard a woman who had just seen the exhibition say to her friend, This isn't a library, it's a jewelry store. Every case is full of gems.


Dion Kliner New York 2000

Ploy

Graham Gillmore - Ploy

Through the gallery’s window, the painting was unmistakably Graham Gillmore’s. The surface was sultry red and the distinctively routered text promised Girls Girls Girls, but like all such come-ons, this one was a ploy, his exhibition is riddled with them. Fold - ins (Ploy) is a small work made by folding a cover of Playboy to get the titular Ploy. Twenty-five similar works arranged in a cluster show other gleefully maligned printed matter from which Gillmore has teased a Clit, a Canadian Ho, and an Anal Hic. Another version of Fold - ins (Ploy) makes an appearance in the painting Ploy. This is Gillmore’s Johnsian summation of his work to this point, and a glimpse of what will follow. Beneath his characteristic red and blue texts, in this case the broken English of Russian mail order brides looped through the sexual preferences of “men seeking women”, and atop his familiar ledger pages, are reproductions from a book on taxidermy, a small version of a masonite painting that transforms Mondrian to wet dream, and numerous other allusions. Towards the bottom of this picture the quality of paint changes and is continued in the pictures which face it. Road Block and In This Group have Gillmore throwing caution to the wind as he pushes material around with a robust painterliness. The texts in these are fully frontal so the space is a shallow text over paint over paper over canvas. Constant here and throughout Gillmore’s work over the years is the singularity of the voice heard in texts which are by turns humorous, and expressive of the uncertainty, difficulty, and fragility of the human condition, and of the tenuous relations that exist between us, so that even in the epic Ploy one can find “this is the epitome of everything that sucks”.


Dion Kliner Vancouver 2004
Published in Flash Art, May - June, Vol.XXXVII, No.236.


http://www.grahamgillmore.com/

Etienne Zack

Looking at the paintings of Etienne Zack makes me think of the thing which I love, which is art. They don't make me think about thinking about art, they elicit the joy of looking at art together with the remembrance of similar occasions past. The reminder isn't of other artists, but about them, and about the experience of having looked at them.  

Spending Time shows an interior.  Alternating bands of pink and yellow insulation sit between the studs of a framed wall with red and blue wiring running through.  A tile floor runs in diagonals towards it.  I recognize the scene as a construction site, but it has the orange flush of a Bonnard.  In front of the wall sits a grayish boxy object with drawing on it which doesn't seem to belong.  Many of the pictures have an object that seems plunked in.  Most have been made by Zack and then painted into remembered sites.  They hover like something coming into or maybe fading from memory and being captured as it does - like coalesced ideas.  To the right is a wooden block with nails partially set in.  Nails appear in four other of Zack's pictures.  Through them the memory of the nails of 17th and 18th century trompe l'oeil still life painters like William Harnett, those of the cubist canvasses of Picasso and Braque, and the nails of Guston all come into consciousness.  

This isn't to say that Zack isn't making pictures which are distinctly his own because he is.  It's that while looking at them one feels the warm glow of history.  What Zack does isn't new.  It isn't shocking or spectacular.  Yet what he does is so little seen and felt as to make it remarkable. 

William Tucker: Something More Than the Body is Afoot

While Detweiller Visiting Artist at Lafayette College, William Tucker wrote a catalogue essay that begins When I was making my first abstract sculptures in the late 1950's, if there was an earlier master I neither respected nor understood, it was Rodin... .  By 1983 Tucker had moved away from the spare rigidity of industrial fabrication that characterized his work and which had dominated progressive sculpture one way or another for nearly seventy years, to return to hand modeling, plaster and bronze---the methods and materials common to Rodin and sculpture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.  Now, less than one month from the end of the century, Tucker finally goes head to head with Rodin in his most recent show of sculpture at the McKee Gallery. 

Of the seven sculptures Tucker is showing, one is a plaster torso, six are bronze heads.  Five of the bronzes are slightly over life-size, the sixth almost four feet tall.  The torso is gigantic, eight feet tall from shoulders to the tops of thighs.  Describing the work as heads and torso is deceptive, however.  Before the sculptures reveal themselves as figurative, the impression is of being in a hall of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  On the left, a massive, white, gypsum concretion.  To the right, a series of meteorites that range in color from light green and yellow, to pewter and blue, to a dark green black.  Some of the specimens are reminiscent of Chinese Scholar's Rocks, particularly those of Qilian and Ying limestone, but anyone who's held a meteorite knows the profound difference between a meteorite and a rock.  Meteorites possess a gravity, and a fluidity of surface that is unique.

With each of the sculptures there is a predominant aspect for the figurative to come into view.  From almost all others the heads maintain their base materiality.  Pomona is another story altogether.  No matter the turbulent conglomeration of plaster, once seen as torso it is hard to lose sight whatever the perspective.  It is a case of knowledge and perception, the way the acquisition of the former inexorably alters the latter.  This is common to all Tucker's work that oozes from the bluntness of material to the complexity of the representational.  With swelling belly and deeply arched back, Pomona twists to the left pulling her right breast upwards.  I once took an oath to Anita Ekberg, but this is the true goddess of sculpture.  As much as Pomona is directed outwards into the room, the heads seem focused on silent internal monologues.  Circling around The Good Soldier or Little Jeanne the forms evolve profile by profile from a landscape of hollows and mounds to a semblance, but only a semblance, of a nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, each one coming in turn until a certain facial resolution crystallizes.  But it's hardly human, a face so disfigured that the nose is smashed to obliteration or torn off altogether, the mouth only a tear or gouge, and the whole covered by bony growths like those of John Merrick, the Elephant Man.  And then, as the circling continues, each devolves back into meteorite---land mass---plaster---bronze.  Of course it never was nose---ear---eye.  It was always material---bronze nose---plaster ear---clay eye.  At the same time we see the face, we are made to see sculpture and the deliberate manipulation of material and form.  Here is the sculptor at work as sculptor.  It is at these moments especially that the real talent of William Tucker is made plain.

As natural forms the heads are interesting.  As sculptural forms they are compelling.  As human forms they are grotesque and terrifying.  What brings the human physiognomy to such grotesquerie?  What moral or physical transgression?  What anguish?  The Gates of Hell never had such accursed residents.  According to Albert Elsen, The description Rodin once gave of the spiritual significance of Michelangelo's sculpture might also apply to his own:  "His sculpture expressed restless energy, the will to act without the hope of success - in fine, the martyrdom of the creature tormented by unrealizable aspirations".  The predicament Rodin has described is common to many artists, and from Michelangelo to Rodin and on to Tucker it gets progressively worse.  To want to work the figure, to want to work sculpture, after so many and so much come before can be a crushing thing.  The sculptures at McKee are Tucker's measured response.

Beyond this, each of the sculptures is a conversation with strong precursors.  Not just Rodin, but Matisse, and the Greeks.  Homage to Rodin (Bibi), the largest of the heads, is a good place to start.  Clearly addressed to Rodin, it is more specifically to Rodin's sculpture The Man with the Broken Nose for which Rodin's handyman Bibi modeled.  Rodin said he kept it in front of him for the rest of his life as a bench mark, and it's a sure bet that Tucker has too.  In Little Jeanne it may be the heads of Jean de Fiennes or Jean D'Aire from Rodin's The Burghers of Calais with which Tucker speaks, or possibly one of the busts from Matisse's series Jeannette, I-V. 

As is well recognized, Rodin is one of the progenitors of modern, and therefore post-modern, figurative art.  Some legacies we intend, others are unforeseen, the misshapen and misbegotten forms of good ideas gone bad.  Though even for Rodin the body of figurative sculpture had been sick for centuries, as represented by a great deal of current figurative work, preoccupations with the body and identity are made to seem the baby snapshots of the art world---carried around lovingly and brought out for viewing at every opportunity, but of little interest to any but the parents.  Tucker's work speaks not only to the commonality of human experience, but to profound materiality.  Unapologetically willing, without posturing or pretense or irony, to take on not only the sense, but also the physicality of the human body, Tucker makes the figure, and sculpture, vital.  Even when unrecognizable, the blunt inevitability of the body is felt.  To many of his younger contemporaries this is in the nature of the issuance of a challenge.  Against the cartoon he posits the human, against the virtual he places the material and the unfashionable notion of work.  Not only about the body, or about sculpture, Tucker also grapples with what it is to be an artist at this time in history.

Gee, ILL no MORE: Graham Gillmore's Finishes I've Never Booked

Painting Lesson, oil and enamel on panel, 120x96 cm, 1998

It's a melancholy object looking at art some days.  Galleries, especially in Chelsea, often resemble morgues.  With their white walls, cement floors, and cold clinical light, the only thing missing are drains in the floor.  In this environment it's no wonder that artists, curators, gallerists, and gallery goers seem like morticians sprucing up a corpse for another public viewing.  It's a collaboration.  Out on the street I can imagine myself pushing a wooden cart and yodelling, Bring out yer dead.  On a good day you can almost smell the formaldehyde, it smells like art.  As an antidote there is the work of Graham Gillmore.  Standing, looking at Gillmore's recent paintings, this is no usual day of the dead.   

Certain precursors are unavoidable consorts in experiencing and producing works of art.  Experiencing art, the relationship is generally smooth sailing.  When producing, it's usually more combative.  Whereas most painters only wrestle with other painters, maybe a sculptor now and again, Gillmore has taken on the painter/writer tag team of Phillip Guston and Samuel Beckett.  And he has pinned them both to the canvas.  He has, in fact, accomplished the difficult and unusual task of seeming to reverse the order of precursor and follower.  As consummate thief Gillmore has brought off a monumental heist;  A good artist borrows, a great artist steals.

  

The distinction that Picasso's maxim makes is a worthwhile one that distinguishes Gillmore from many of his contemporaries.  When the work of a precursor can be seen in the work of one who comes later some would call it influence, others appropriation, and still others plagiarism.  Yet not all instances of influence are a series of plagiarisms, nor all plagiarism uninspired.  This is something I happen to know something about.  As an undergraduate in philosophy I was charged with plagiarism in both Philosophy of Religion, and Ethics.  The difference in plagiarism in these two courses is the difference between borrowing and theft;  between the flatness of appropriation, and the dynamism of influence.  In philosophy of Religion the plagiarism was the dull sort where with very little energy I selected an essay and copied it.  As is traditional I switched a few words around to make the borrowing less obvious.  In Ethics, however, the plagiarism was complete; word for word.  The essay was on Moral Egoism which states simply that whatever is done in one's own self-interest is justified.  Clearly, this can include plagiarism.  

On the one hand there's simply dipping into the time stream and pulling something out as the appropriator does.  On the other is the real and dynamic relationship with a precursor that Paul Valery recognized as being of the greatest interest as the work of one modifies the mind of another.  Because Gillmore's theft is so complete, it's almost as if on seeing Guston and reading Beckett in the future one would say...Gillmore.  For my theft in Ethics I was given the option of either accepting a job at the university, or admitting to plagiarism.  I took the plagiarism and was expelled.  I should have said it was influence.     

I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps.  That is not what matters.

                    S. Beckett, from Molloy.

Where to start in describing the work of Graham Gillmore?  It seems immediately profound then absurd, then absurd then profound turn by turn about.  Perhaps nothing describes it better than paradox.  Duality and reversal are everywhere.  Throughout the paintings, antitheses are established then somersault or vanish altogether.  The complexity is enough to make your head spin.  It begins with first principles, with a reflection of Descartes' fundamental dualism of mind and body in Gillmore's text and paint.  Yet the moment this duality crests, it suddenly turns turtle and word is made flesh, collapsing into unity.  The drooping, limpid forms that Gillmore lets stand independently or with which he encapsulates his texts become identical with the flaccid, skeptical texts themselves.  Within the categories of text and paint, other paradoxes soon cartwheel into view.  That's the thing with Gillmores, you never know.  Imagine a Gillmore painting leading you down a garden path.  Moving left, the painting suddenly turns right, or even worse, after beginning in front you suddenly realize that it is behind and following rather than leading.  What to do?  To continue leading will be not to see the painting.  About face and you risk bumping into it and bringing everything to a standstill.  Stand still is the only solution.  As with Molloy, the only way to progress is to stop.  Then one of two things will happen.  Three if nothing happens at all.  One, the painting will bump into you and push in the right direction.  Two, the painting will pass and it will be possible to follow again until the positions are once again reversed.

In several of the texts and titles of the paintings Gillmore has swapped or reversed individual letters or word order of otherwise familiar titles or phrases to form his own:  Greaves of Lass, Finishes I've Never Booked.  Besides these instances where the reversals are more straight forward, his texts are full of educated literary references that are often confused or misspelled.  Gillmore's no hillbilly, so what kind of willful misunderstanding is going on here?  What's Gillmore opening up by his deliberate misspelling and misassigning?     

Without having to look around much, what comes easily to hand is an engagement with one of the fundamental ideas of Modern art, that rearrangement releases the potential that exists in every arrangement.  It's Cubism, though clearly Gillmore's no Cubist.  After Cubism, this developed into the practice of juxtaposition, a crucial and defining characteristic of Modernism, but especially that of the avant-garde arts at the beginning of the Twentieth century.  Yet Gillmore's not just painting another Cubist picture or adding another assisted Readymade or letting the principle of chance step close and have a roll.  He's no demirep with a feather duster pulling an old trick out of the closet.  At the same time, by turning the idea to his own as he does, Gillmore shows again the dynamism of influence and makes it interesting to place his work next to those that came before him to see what it says.  

One of the things Gillmore brings up with his erroneous juxtapositions of authors and titles is the notion of buried texts.  Let's use J.G. Ballard (spelled Ballad), The Drowned World (written by Ballard),  and Eugene Ionesco (spelled Ugene Ionesc o)  from Gillmore's Finishes I've Never Booked as an example.  In the painting, Ionesco seems to be paired with The Drowned World, as Ballard seems paired with Sons and Lovers.  Is Gillmore suggesting that Ionesco is buried within The Drowned World as perhaps Ballard is buried within Sons and Lovers and Rushdie buried in Bunny's Torrid Snatch, another of Gillmore's cockeyed matches?  In more than a figurative sense,  one text can be said to exist concretely within  another.  Imagine atomizing the text of The Drowned World, dissolving it back into its constitutive letters; so many "a"s, so many "b"'s, and so on.  What you're left with is a heap of letters that contains all the potential energy that ever existed in The Drowned World.  With these letters it may be possible to rewrite Ionesco's The Bald Soprano.  In some sense, then, The Drowned World can be said to exist within The Bald Soprano, and vice versa.  Even more than this, not only may The Drowned World be in there, but any number of other texts as well.  What could it mean that The Drowned World is in The Bald Soprano, or that Genesis is in The Communist Manifesto?  I don't know, but by suggesting that there is something beneath or beyond the surface, something which is perhaps forever unknowable, is to return to one of the primary and most profound questions of Epistemology and Metaphysics.  Surface is something which seems especially redolent to Gillmore.  What is above and below the surface?  Of knowledge.  Of the paint.  That dividing line is frustratingly, expansively suggestive.  Even the words used to describe Gillmore's paintings are evocative of themselves.  Say the word puddle, and the mind begins to ebb and flood.  Soon Pollock and Frankenthaler and Smithson bob into view.  Once so reminded, possibilities eddy around the work and then hold fast or are cut loose.  With the bedeviling question of surface, it's never a sure face.  

Scratching the surface of Gillmore's paintings turns up burials not only figurative, but literal as well.  There's a constant submerging as layer on layer sinks below the surface to murky depths.  Liquidity prevails here.  In Painting Lesson #1 and Untitled, (This Time I Am Definately Not Going To Fall Into The Same Old Trap), for instance, the text is routered below the surface of the wood support on which it's painted.  Compared to I Think I Can, I Thought I Could and to texts in general, the thing on top has been reversed with the thing on bottom.  The text has sunk below the surface, under the paint, behind the background.  Buried text.   

Gillmore's routing of the text does more than simply bury it though.  As a technique it's completely tied to the central themes of duality and paradox.  In paintings like I Think I Can, I Thought I Could, Painting Lesson #1, and Finishes I've Never Booked, the dualities are stacked top on bottom with an almost missionary ardor.  In I Think I Can, I Thought I Could, on top of the financial and mercantile, the pages of an old ledger, Gillmore has layered the aesthetic and literary.  On top of the body, Gillmore has imposed the mind.  On top of the assurety and seductiveness of the paint itself and Gillmore's handling of it, he has placed the contingency of the text, a recapitulation of body and mind.

Yet on the paintings on wooden supports, Painting Lesson #1, and Untitled, (This Time I Am Definately Not Going To Fall Into The Same Old Trap) to name two, though the text remains self-conscious and equivocal in its expression, Gillmore has routered it into the support leaving no room for contingency or doubt.  This reverses everything.  The routing of the text makes it the more committed and the paint becomes more contingent.  For the text, no changes are possible, no mistakes changeable, and no possibilities mistaken.  It's absolute.  By so committing himself, by making the text so concrete physically yet so self-conscious and contingent psychologically, Gillmore contradicts the spirit of the text, while at the same time revealing through the text what may be a more deeply engraved depression.  

In Painting Lesson #1 and the earlier Fatal Flaw, there is the paradox of the relationship between the text and the painting itself.  Taking the paintings at their word, we assume that the text, "This part (Lower R) seems to be coming right at you only to veer away at the last second" and "If I could have done this section over again I would have left it completely empty" from Painting Lesson #1, or "This section here will teach you everything you need to know about what doesn't work" from Fatal Flaw, is about the painting on which it is written.  This, of course, turns out to be our fatal flaw as it soon becomes apparent, though not soon enough, that the part labeled "This part (Lower R)..." is not the lower right of the painting at all, but much closer to the upper right.  More so than with the skewed authors and titles, we're thrown off balance and a radical skepticism invades the consciousness.  A skeptical gap opens up that can only be crossed by a bridge of misunderstanding.           

The realization that comes is that there is no paint before the text is routered into the wooden support so that in a painting like Painting Lesson #1 we have to understand the text as either preceding the paint and directing rather than commenting upon it, or as not being about this painting we're looking at, but as coming from some larger text about some other painting.  The latter seems the more plausible.  In this case, the alloying of unrelated elements is another form of juxtaposition that allows a third understanding to emerge.  At the same time, it makes both the text of the painting and the paint of the painting absurd, pointing away from itself as a painting and towards the difficulty or maybe impossibility of communication, as in a segment of text from a play by Jurgen Becker:

- Yes I'm here.

- Then I'm coming over.

- But I'm leaving again.

- Well, wait for me.

- I'll be coming back.

- I won't be there then.

- Well, you wait.

- I'll come back.

- Then I'll be gone again.

- Well, I just won't come then.

- Yeah, I won't be here anyway.

What's left of the paintings once the text is removed?  Why, duality and paradox.  But with the paint, it's a paradox of a different color.  The paint is lush and seductive in surface and color, but describes forms that are tuberous and alimentary.  Though the forms are seemingly contingent, the execution is seductive and assured.  The lumpish forms that Gillmore chooses to paint contradict his execution of them.  

Not often mentioned in discussions of Gillmore's work are the squares and rectangles, but most often squares, that appear in almost every painting.  Lots of ink has been spilled about his amorphous pools, his balloons or clouds or bladders or innards, but those regular geometries, not much.  Granted they're not as prominent or evocative or hip as the blob, but Gillmore has thought enough to add them so they must be worth considering.  By their addition, a duality is set up between the symmetry of the squares and its want in the bulbous eccentricities.  They seem to be reminders of Modernism and a history of painting sometimes submerged, and sometimes holding the plane.  Allying with the crystalline surface, these geometric forms  support the impersonal and modernist and minimalist.  But this is in tension with the writing and the routing and the flaccid forms which suggest the artist writ large.  No brush strokes disturb the dense, hard, translucent surfaces of Gillmore's paintings.  Any trace of the artist is eliminated in the painting by technique, but the artist is there completely in the text.  The painting is depersonalized and yet entirely about the artist.

With both text and paint there's a similar operation underway, the what contradicts the how.  The what of the text contradicts the how of the text.  The what of the paint contradicts the how of the paint.  The what of the text and the what of the paint are consistent.  The how of the text and the how of the paint are consistent.  The what of the text and paint contradict the how of the text and paint.  It's the what that reveals the more deeply engraved depression.  This contradiction of what and how makes the paintings more absurd, more humorous than they are otherwise.  And Gillmore's works are absurd as they are profound.  In The Absurd, A. Hinchliffe noted that Camus saw "a work of art as an absurd phenomenon, but one in which personal awareness is brought out for others to see in the hope of making them aware also, and indicating the common fate".  Like Camus, Gillmore's art is also significantly concerned with the human condition.  If there is a transcript of Sisyphus' infernal monologue as he pushes around his boulder, I Think I Can, I Thought I Could may be it.  So it's not painting that's the problem for Gillmore.  It's not how to apply paint.  It's not what to paint.  It must be why to paint.  On this question there is unquestionably a Modern engagement with self-consciousness, futility, and the plodding effort to continue in spite of all.  In the grip of this terrible splendor, Descartes' supreme expression of self-consciousness "I think, therefore I am" is ripened to "I think, therefore I cannot".

In an interview with Robin Laurence, Gillmore said he wanted to "debase the exalted and to exalt the debased".  My hat's off to him, but taking Gillmore at his word, are we waking Gillmore at his turd?  Is he crapping us?  I'd say not.  Without doubt a subversive cant runs from Dan to Beersheba in Gillmore's work and in his undermining of, well, of something exalted, or something debased.  

In earlier work this included pornography and philosophy.  Recently,  Gillmore seems to be taking the piss out of literature.  Or is it illiteracy?  Or elitism?  In several of the paintings there is the supposition of a necessary level of erudition to make the works pop, and come into focus.  Not to know Leaves of Grass is to be cut short of appreciating Greaves of Lass.  Not knowing that it was J.G. Ballard and not Eugene Ionesco that wrote The Drowned World leaves one high and dry in front of Finishes I've Never Booked for both its absurd, melancholy humor and its suggestive triangulation of authors and titles that may be intended to lend insight, or maybe not.  Leading as it may be, there's no reason to make the connection.  Pairing by proximity is nothing more than our compulsive need to make order where there is none.  As Watt might instruct us, No order where none intended.

Whatever Gillmore is exalting or debasing, throughout his work there's a necessary degree of knowledge required to understand and appreciate it more extensively.  Presuming and requiring a sophistication as he does and then subverting it with the conspiracy of Mrs. Malaprop, is Gillmore engaging in anti -elitism, satiric elitism, or, in fact, elitism?  When the only way to get it is to know it and then to exalt the knowing of it seems elitist.  When the only way to get it is to know it and then to debase the knowing of it seems a form of anti or satiric elitism, but falls into elitism in the having to know to get.     

Here is where Gillmore really lays the axe to the root.  By undressing the question of elitism by way of literature, Gillmore raises the horny matter in art.  And nothing's more subversive than admitting the elitism of art.  Why this should be is muddy and crabbed.  If it's necessary to be literate to understand literature,  it seems no more elitist to be expected to be able to see one's way in the subject of art and its history.  No one argues that the expectation of literacy is a form of elitism.  An author rightly expects that their audience can read.  When did you ever hear a writer proudly announce "I write for the illiterate"?  It doesn't happen.  It would be absurd to say that an author is elitist because they write only for an audience that has been educated to read.  Yet people, artists among them, bristle when it's suggested that the audience for art should be likewise educated.  What is it about art that brings with it the expectation that it is for all regardless of education?  What other discipline supports such a proposition?  Religion may be the only one.  And if the popular idea of some secular equivalence of art and religion is accurate, then god help us all.

Cruising at 31,000 feet on a flight from New York to Las Vegas over, of all places, Little Rock, Arkansas, I saw Gillmore's forms superimposed on a Suprematist background below.  This wasn't the usual checkerboard of fields that is such a common sight on trans-continental flights, but random, isolated squares and rectangles of green on an otherwise undifferentiated ground.  Primitive oxbows of a forgotten river connected by the thin lines of dried stream beds still marked the landscape encapsulating parcels of land.  Sections filled with water, but dammed at both ends, created truncated segments of shimmering liquid.  From this vantage point, I'm in a position not unlike Gillmore's as he looks down on his paintings while he's making them.  On a clear day you can see for miles.  When small clouds partially obscure the view, all you can see is Gillmore.


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