Just came across this letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse. It seems like great advice in favor of losing preconceptions and hangups. (I wish I could credit who passed it on to me, but it was through Facebook, which has become too unmanageable and unwieldy. I click a link and read it hours later and then lose all hopes of tracing the source. C'est l'internet). Here's the beginning:
Dear Eva,
It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don't! Learn to say "Fuck You" to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!
I just finished Ross Feld's wonderful book "Guston in Time." Feld belongs to that line of poets like Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara that were deeply involved in visual art. He brings an incredible eye and descriptive power to Philip Guston's work and also a great asset: he was one of Guston's closest friends in the later years.
This book lays open the minds of two artists struggling to get at something in their work and arguing over what it means to create. The book is quite short, and much of it consists of letters between Guston and Feld. Guston had given up abstract painting and was considered a traitor by many in the art world. He said he could no longer spend his life just measuring whether a dab of red would suffice on the picture plane. Abstraction and "pure" picture-making held no more allure for him. He had to paint recognizable forms and figures.
Guston tells Feld about teaching at Boston University and watching a student trying to paint a mural with a clock in it. The student fussed over how to paint the clock, working a long time and re-working it over and over. In the end, says Guston, he went over to the mural and grabbed the student's brush. "You want a clock? Here's a clock!" he said, and painted in a crude clock.
I was quite taken by the following paragraph written by Guston. The underlining is all by the artist. At issue is why paint one thing over another. Why fuss over how to paint a particular form? Why paint at all? Guston says this:
Ross--what is creating--this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it--throw off the dross--make the architecture and content impossible to take apart--not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet, working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unmanageable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces, transforms the meaning. I know I'm going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa [Guston's wife], in the next room, just said "Did I hear a big sigh?")
Well--perhaps one should remain satisfied just to stay on the treadmill--to remain on it--maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My God! A lifetime spent--to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself--to come in the studio next day and feel--"I did that?" Is this me--To catch oneself off-guard?
"You want a clock? Here's a clock!" Oh, if it were only as direct and simple as that!
Former Artforum editor Joseph Masheck and MoMA's John Elderfield have a good conversation about Piet Mondrian and his retrospective in 1996 in the video from Charlie Rose below. It's clear Rose doesn't know much about Mondrian, but his combative and aggressive questioning eventually gets at something interesting.
And speaking of something interesting (and Joseph Masheck), I came across this quote by Thomas Nozkowski at artist Ashlynn Browning's site:
I think any artist reaches a point at which their motor skills have developed. Once their brain/hand coordination's gotten to a certain level, they finally know how to do their own paintings. And it's a terrible moment. A terrible, terrible thing. Before that, it's all adventure. I'm gonna crash and burn or I'm gonna make it happen. Suddenly, you can make it happen, and that's scary. It's really the worst position, I think, for an artist to be in, and you have to find a way around it. Years ago, Joe Masheck and I were talking about Renoir's Society of Irregularists, the fight against what Renoir called false perfection. He said something like, "I'm going to start painting with my left hand and mess it up on purpose." And fifteen, twenty years ago, Joe and I were saying, "This is really lame, what a rotten idea." Now I find myself getting older, and I think: Oh, my God, now I know why he was saying this. He was asking: How do you keep up the energy that you had when you were on a tightrope? How do you make a new tightrope for yourself?
Similarly, John Elderfield quotes Mondrian in the video: "I'm not interested in making paintings. I'm interested in finding things out."
(The Mondrian discussion in the video starts around 39:45)
Jennifer came across this passage in Peter J. Conradi's biography of English author and philosopher Iris Murdoch that reminded me of Matisse's notorious comparison between art and a comfortable armchair. In a dialogue by Murdoch, Plato and Socrates argue about the meaning of art. Plato says art is an evasion, that it prevents people from confronting the gods. Socrates answers:
You say art consoles us and prevents us from taking the final step ... It may be that human beings can only achieve second best, that second best is our best ... Homer is imperfect. Science is imperfect ... our truth must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best, that all our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn't mean there is no difference between the good and the bad in what we achieve. And it doesn't mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest truthful spirit. This is our truth ...
It may even be that ... good art tells us more truth about our lives and our world than any other kind of thinking or speculation -- it certainly speaks to more people. And perhaps the language of art is the most universal and enduring kind of human thought ... We are all artists, we are all story-tellers ... And we should thank the gods for great artists who draw away the veil of anxiety and selfishness and show us, even for a moment, another world, a real world, and tell us a little bit of truth. And we should not be too hard on ourselves for being comforted.
Another reason why later Cezanne is better than early
I read this passage from Annie's Dillard's Living By Fiction , her exploration of what makes writing meaningful, and thought it could be applied to painting just as well:
We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work's integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures towards stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama--suicide, rape, murder, incest--or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.
From his essay "What Abstract Art Means to Me," 1951:
Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need.
The need is for felt experience--intense, immediate, direct, subltle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.
Everything that might dilute the experience is stripped away. The origin of abstraction in art is that of any mode of thought. Abstract art is a true mysticism--I dislike the word--or rather a series of mysticisms that grew up in the historical circumstance that all mysticisms do, from a primary sense of guly, an abyss, a void between one's lonely self and the world. Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel. Its abstraction is its emphasis.
One wonders what Motherwell would say about "funky abstraction," or someone like Mary Heilmann, or even Al Held.
There's been a lull in my posting recently since the sweetest thing came into my life: Iris Ellington Swartz Turfle, my baby girl, born February 12. For all the cute pics of baby drooling, and adults drooling over a baby, check out my Flickr account. I'm sure loyal DG readers will understand why art blogging was one of the last things on my mind.
That doesn't mean making art has gone to the back burner, however, as I've entered an extremely productive phase and have been very busy in the studio lately. I'll post pics soon of what's bubbling out in this very green time.
And, as life with a newborn becomes more manageable, look forward to more regular posts here.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share a great quote I found from an interview with Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman that relates to a lot of my past year in the studio.
As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he came to realize that his anxieties about not making anything of value were an atavistic relic from the religious notion that something exists which can be called Supreme Good, or that anything is perfect. When he'd dug up this secret idea, this relic, had seen through it and amputated it, he lost his artistic inhibitions too.
"Sometimes I'm afraid of yellow."
-Willem de Kooning
"As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring."
-Wassily Kandinsky
Make up your own mind by listening to The Scene is Now's "Yellow Sarong" (which was later covered by Yo La Tengo). Watch Ken Nordine's "Yellow" put to animation:
"When I walk into a gallery now, I don't see anything. It's as if the artists spent all their time trying to find ways how not to do anything. Just because you don't do anything, doesn't mean you've said something. And, as Harold Rosenberg once pointed out, just because you don't say something doesn't mean it's true."
I picked up Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" from the library a few weeks ago. I've always admired his engagement in the political and social realities around him, although sometimes his work veers into illustration. But some pieces hit me hard.
His painting of "The Passion of Sacco and Venzetti" in their coffins haunts me. Shahn believed in the innocence of both Sacco and Venzetti, and painted them compassionately as corpses laying below a triumvirate of academics, bureaucrats and the judge responsible for allowing a travesty of justice.
I believe Shahn was wrong about the two Italian men being wrongly accused. I don't think both Sacco and Venzetti were innocent; there is a lot of evidence to indict Sacco and plenty to exonerate Venzetti. As I read more about the case, a strange thing happened. Instead of dismissing Shahn's work, I began to appreciate it even more.
