Daughter of the Wild Women: Aleah Chapin at Flowers Gallery

OK, so, this appeared originally at Huffington, and it has taken me a while to get around to posting it here. But that's just as well, because I've got a bit of follow-up which I'll do in the next post. In the meantime, I worked pretty hard, for me, on this piece (three drafts) and was happy that it was able in the end to communicate one or two ideas.

INCARNATION

To sensibly discuss Aleah Chapin's new solo show at Flowers Gallery, we should start closer to the beginning of the story. So let's back up a bit.

The Torre de la Parada, outside Madrid, 1636 A.D.

Peter Paul Rubens hangs a commissioned pair of Greek-philosopher paintings on the wall of this royal hunting lodge. One is Heraclitus, "the crying philosopher":

Diego Velazquez is born a couple decades after Rubens, but they are active at the same time, and even hang out together and admire some Titian paintings.

Not long after Rubens finishes with his philosophers, Velazquez gets commissioned to paint two more paintings, to hang opposite the Rubens pieces. Any self-respecting artist presented with such a commission is going to try to one-up the existing work, and Velazquez is no exception. Here's his Aesop, of 1640:

To my uneducated eye, the contrast between these two paintings represents a revolution. Your instinct is to say that Rubens paints a type, striking a pose, and Velazquez an individual, displaying a posture. And this is a fair description. But I think the distinction is more profound, and occurs at a more basic level. Rubens concocts his characteristically magnificent swirl of paint, rich, bold, expressive. Velazquez, on the other hand, conforms his range of values and distribution of detail to the ordinary cognitive template of the human eye sweeping a scene. There is something restful and real to the Velazquez which makes Heraclitus look as stylized as a Saturday morning cartoon. With his absurd tears rolling down his cheeks. It is difficult to look at the Velazquez, and then to look back at the Rubens.

"Technology" does not mean the same thing as "machine." All means by which human intellection intervenes in the raw operation of nature are in some sense technologies. Painting is a technology. Strictly, it is a technology of representation (we can talk about abstract art another day). Velazquez's revolution is a technological revolution. He invents a new set of tools for matching the mechanism of human sight. This invention makes Rubens, as a technologist, obsolete. The manipulation of visual cognition in mainstream painting, for centuries after, follows after Velazquez.

This is not an unmitigated good. No one set of tools can do everything. Velazquez's tools are mighty tools, but they have limits. Compare two more paintings. Here is what Rubens makes of Mars:

Mars and Rhea Silvia, c. 1620

This Mars is vigorous, brightly colored, fleshy and strong -- well-suited to the active role he plays in the narrative of the painting overall. Now here is what Velazquez does with the subject:

Mars, c. 1640

Velazquez's warrior drops out of narrative. His face is nearly lost in shadow. He is much more believable as a human figure, and he radiates a crouching menace Rubens will never capture.
Velazquez's mechanism is not so good for depicting motion, narrative, and allegory -- Velazquez marks the beginning of the long decline of allegory. He generates a paradox: he makes the depiction of flesh more real, but makes the invoking of Flesh less possible. We see this fairly clearly in the depiction of the muscles of men. But we see it most clearly in the depiction of the curves of women. Consider Velazquez's tongue-unrolls, hearts-pop-from-eyeballs depiction of Venus:

The Rokeby Venus, 1644-8

She's got a nice ass, but we are very close now to the genre of model-in-the-studio-dolled-up-with-a-couple-props-as-mythology-painting. Now go back to Rubens, painting his second wife Helene Fourment:

The Fur, 1630s

This painting is not as realistic as the Velazquez painting. Rubens natters on about her cellulite. She's more tactile than Velazquez's sleek model. I bring it up because of this, and further because it includes a detail which is nearly unique, in my knowledge, in the history of Western art: a woman taking an action on her own body which causes her nipples to point in noticeably different directions.

A lot of art (and, frankly, life) is about breasts, so this is worth talking about a bit. Throughout the history of art, from Willendorf on down, there is a kind of horror at the idea of asymmetrical breasts. In real life, of course, most women have minor or major breast asymmetries, and many actions will cause the kind of soft-tissue elastic deformation seen in Rubens's The Fur. But for all of the obsession of Western art with the body, and especially with the breasts part of the body, this particular phenomenon is hardly ever seen. Not even in Madonna-nursing-Jesus paintings:

Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim, Jean Fouquet, 1452

It is nearly unthinkable for Velazquez to do what Rubens does so casually in The Fur. Just as asymmetrical breasts in a classical Greek sculpture would read as an insult to its symmetrical sculpture-as-Idea ethos, so they would be all-too-real in Velazquez, too distracting from the noble and detached emotions we are supposed to be experiencing when we look at art. If Velazquez pulled a stunt like this, it would come across as porn from the age of mustaches. Because Velazquez has amped up the realism of his portrayals, he has ironically restricted his subject matter -- things depictable using Rubens's blunter technology become overpowering with Velazquez's more refined tools. Velazquez is dainty in a way that Rubens is not.

Let's return to The Fur. It is not only important that Helene takes a pose most painters refuse to depict. It is also important that this pose is not imposed upon her. Consider Agnolo Bronzino's erotic masterpiece, Naked Lady Getting Felt Up By Lad:

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time [Allegory of the Triumph of Venus], Agnolo Bronzino, 1540-5

Here we have some champion breast-groping, but being classically minded, it has two features absent from Rubens: almost no asymmetry results, and the actual possessor of the breast in question plays a physically passive role.

Rubens, to me, represents the zenith of what I would call incarnation in painting. His work is carnal, he ardently depicts human beings as flesh, as meat. Velazquez has lost some of this quality, with his emphasis on the mechanism of perception. Rubens does not care as much about perception -- he carries a stronger inheritance of the older premise of the thing-in-itself. He is modern in the complexity of his understanding of forms, but ancient in his understanding of the meaning of forms. His forms are not carnal alone, not only meat - the soul is placed in this voluptuous flesh, it is incarnate. It is a self-willed principle, acting on its vessel and on the world around it. Rubens says to Helene, "Helene, dearheart, would you pose for a nude?" And Helene says, "Sure thing, Pookie-Bear - how about this?"

Perhaps Rubens says, "Honey, that pose is making your boobs point in different directions." And perhaps Helene says, "How much of a fuck do you think I give?"

But more likely, I think, Rubens says, "Perfect, I love it. Hold that -- don't change a thing."

This network of concepts came to mind when I saw the headline painting, Step, in Aleah Chapin's new solo show:

Aleah Chapin, Step, oil on canvas, 2012, 74"x61"

IN THE COMPANY OF OLDER WOMEN

A couple things it is useful, but not necessary, to know about Aleah Chapin when approaching her work.

First is a biographical detail. I'm not clear on the whole story, but I have the impression she was raised around her mom and her mom's buddies, "the aunties," and that the aunties are willing to consider alternative relationships with wearing clothing. So the women in Chapin's paintings are the community in the midst of which she was raised. Her figures are people with whom she has a life-long relationship.

The second is a professional detail. Chapin attended the New York Academy of Art. This Warhol-cofounded school is, counterintuitively, one of the foremost centers of training in classical, representational painting in the United States. I didn't go there myself, but I paint figures and I live in New York, so I run into NYAA grads all the time.

You can generally tell that NYAA grads went to NYAA from their work. They all have really strong technical skills, with a certain amount of painterly verve. They understand their tools well enough to deploy them for certain tricks. However, they had the same teachers, so they learned the same tricks, and these tricks, therefore, shout "NYAA." More on this in a bit.

I am a huge fan of NYAA and what they stand for, but their program is a double-edged sword. It brings to mind Clement Greenberg's famous remark about Edward Hopper: "If he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist." NYAA turns out only better painters. There is a lot of good art to be made in struggle against technical limitations. This kind of art-making is denied to NYAA's graduates. They are all fantastic painters. And they all, therefore, face art's sternest question naked: What am I going to paint?

Chapin has come up with some very good answers to this question. Here's her painting Shanti & Heather, 2012:

Aleah Chapin, Shanti & Heather, oil on panel, 2012, 60"x48"

First, a few touches which read very NYAA to me:

This is a big, confident composition with imposingly large figures. The figures are lit by a soft, flat, frontal light which allows them to be rendered in terms of alternating passages of cool and warm colors, clustering around a middle gray. Texture is produced, especially in the legs, by side-by-side opaque and transparent highlights: some of the highlights are light-colored paint, and others are patches so thin the white panel ground shows through. The figures overall are built up by means of many unblended, slightly curving, parallel brushstrokes. Where the required level of detail falls in the background, paint is unhesitatingly applied in larger, flatter regions.

Every one of these properties of the painting is typical of NYAA training. Chapin does it better than anyone else I've seen, but most do it to one extent or another. Her talent and her skills are superior, but they are not what make her special. Her vision is. So let's talk about what we see in this painting.

Here we have two naked older women. They are clearly physically vigorous, but their age is tending to give them the ape-like, barrel-bellied interchangeability of the old. That is, they do not look the same, but they do not look so different as perhaps they once did. One of them has had a mastectomy. The other has breasts of ordinary asymmetry. They are hanging out naked in a forest, as if they were naturists, or persistent hippies, or Wiccans of some sort. Their nudity does not seem to be such a huge big deal to them - their shoulders and arms are relaxed - but their chins are raised and their eyes hooded in their direct gaze at the viewer, suggesting that they are prepared to vigorously defend their position. Maybe it is not their position on nudity, but given that they're not wearing anything, that's the most obvious possibility.

Here's what this painting says to me. These women, with their dynamic contrapposto stances, sun-lobstered chests, shaggy hair, direct gazes, and powerful hands, are, like Rubens's Helene, self-possessed and self-willed. They are not humorless, but they are tough.

Aleah Chapin, Shanti & Heather (detail), oil on panel, 2012, 60"x48"

These legible facets of their personality interact with their age and wounds to tell a story. The story is about confronting mortality, not by pretending it away, but by acknowledging it without making too much of it. These women seem to me to have decided that the best way to deal with aches and illness and decay is by going on living as well as possible, as long as possible. They do not believe that they are growing weak, or useless, or ugly, and they do not give a damn if we don't feel the same way. The vital force of their belief acts upon our own belief. They like themselves and they like each other, and we cannot help liking them too. The way they live is admirable.

Look - I feel a little awkward making such a fuss about their age and its effects. I feel like these paintings are visitors from a world where this isn't an issue, and I'm just proving how fallen our own world is. But here's the thing: Chapin won the BP Portrait Award last year, an important British award, with a similar painting, and you should have seen the vitriol in the comment threads of online articles about the painting, the whining and bitching about "why do I have to look at this woman?" So - yes, it's an issue (although there was a lot of praise in those threads too). Chapin and her subjects are making a distinct statement, and even though my interpretation may date itself over time, right now, it's apropos: these are badass naked older women.

Now we return to Step:

Aleah Chapin, Step, oil on canvas, 2012, 74"x61"

This is probably Chapin's most ambitious painting to date: a vibrating interaction of multiple overlapping figures. Here we move beyond the depiction of the individual to a portrayal of "the aunties" as a community of like-minded longtime friends. Like each of us, they retain a young self-image, awakening to their age only intermittently. They have been running around naked on the heath forever, rowdy as the maenads that gave Orpheus such a hard time.

We'll talk about breasts one last time. Just like Helene, the auntie on the left takes a self-willed action which causes asymmetrical elastic deformation of her breast. It's a weird, nearly comical turn. I asked a female friend what the gesture said to her, and she said, "Intimacy." For my part, it talks to me about total self-confidence, about flinging your body around because it does its job fine and it's yours to do with as you please. What's so special or new about this idea? Nothing. It's just that this mode of expressing it has almost never been done in painting.

There is something cartoonish to this work, just as there is to Rubens. The light is centered, but it is too centered, reflecting off the dead center of each form -- just as it does in Rubens. A flat overall glow prevents any point from growing too bright, or too dark -- as in Rubens. The less important passages are sketched in, not with the indistinctness of Velazquez, but with the illustrationistic minimalism of Rubens. The composition swirls around dynamic figures in a way characteristic of Rubens, not Velazquez. The flesh is not depicted, as in Velazquez; instead, the Flesh is lustily invoked, as Rubens invokes it.

Here we have Chapin's answer to the urgent question of what to do with the powerful tools she has earned with her education. She turns her back on hundreds of years of the mainstream of figuration, from Velazquez, to Manet, to Sargent. She revives an older technology, a technology with a humanism that gives her the vocabulary she needs to express her insight.

She herself emerges from an eccentric microculture, a hermetic and vital sisterhood with its own unique mix of affection, strength, humor, and self-confidence. Chapin, in some psychologically pressing way, is the communal daughter of myth-like women, and she turns to the visual idiom of myth in order to paint her inheritance. This idiom, the Rubens idiom, happens to be highly compatible with the painterly skills she acquired in graduate school. So she rivets them together, because for now, at least, she needs to set down on canvas what makes these women and their lives so special.

This is such a wonderful thing to get a chance to look at.

---

All non-Chapin paintings via wikipedia.org or wikipaintings.org

All Chapin paintings courtesy Flowers Gallery

"Aleah Chapin: Solo Show" opening January 17th, 6-8 p.m., exhibition through February 23rd, 529 West 20th St., New York, NY, 10011 [OK, obviously, you missed this, but keep an eye out for when she's showing again]

Ambition Warned

An important thing: you may be great, and your art may be your life. But have something else in your life too. Do it on principle, do it even if you cannot make your gut believe in its necessity. Why? Here - here is one of my core fears, transcribed nearly perfectly in Greg Bear's City at the End of Time:

In Praise of the Bean: Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate," Millennium Park, Chicago

I haven't been back to Chicago since 1996.

Among the things I've missed was the creation of Millennium Park, and with it, of the Bean, a 100-ton stainless steal colossus completed years behind schedule in 2006. Who could be so hard of heart that they would go to Chicago and not want to see the Bean? Not I. So I'm back, and I went to see the Bean.

To think about the Bean, let's think about the architecture of Chicago. Chicago may or may not be a city of big shoulders, but it is definitely a city of big-shouldered skyscrapers. Its skyscrapers hulk, throwing weighty boxes above the city streets. There is a heaviness to Chicago School architecture which is specific to Chicago.

New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution imposed the pyramid on New York architecture, creating the tapering, balletic skyscrapers of Manhattan. When you think about it, the original World Trade Center towers were really Chicago towers; the new World Trade Center, a soaring glass needle, is much more New Yorkian.

Chicago's stolid towers create a sense of might: of labor, industry, and commerce. As a body of architecture, they are a glorious portrait and instance of the productive facet of the American character; one of our best facets.

For all that this concentrated strength is a heroic phenomenon, like most heroic phenomena, it carries a necessary flaw. José Ortega y Gasset described this flaw in his 1929 essay The Revolt of the Masses:

When in the early stages of the Empire some cultured provincial - Lucan or Seneca - arrived in Rome, and saw the magnificent imperial buildings, symbols of an enduring power, he felt his heart contract within him. Nothing new could now happen in the world. Rome was eternal.

p. 33

The very success of the principle of Chicago has a tendency to stifle the future of Chicago. We are no longer a child nation, as perhaps we were when Chicago burned in 1871; nor are we a vigorous young nation, as Edward Hopper depicted us at mid-century. Instead, we are a mature nation, prone to intimidation by our own past successes, tending toward sclerosis.

What is sclerosis, but the gradual choking of vitality by obstacles strong enough to impede and numb, but brittle enough to shatter and kill? In our maturity, it behooves us to guard against sclerosis, against that contracting of the heart which Ortega y Gasset describes.

It is to an anti-sclerotic campaign that the Bean brilliantly contributes.

The Bean has the uncanny perfection of a metaphysical object, of a digital effect circa Terminator 2. Approaching the Bean from the south, one sees only a distortion of space, an incredible inconsistency:

It is so perfect that it seems to have arrived from another planet. One sympathizes with Kapoor's distress at its premature unveiling in 2004, before construction was complete. Just as the Bean is perfect in space, it should be perfect in time as well: its polished surface is designed to erase its own origin.

Coming nearer, one sees that it has panoptic properties: its elliptic geometry replicates on its surface the entire visible city. But the city is not absorbed by the Bean without transformation. Here I am in Millennium Park, the city behind me:

Or, rather, here is the image of me in the mind of the Bean, joined to the image of the park and the image of the city. This is very much the impression one has, staring into the surface of the Bean - that the immense reflective surface is like a mind, in the sense that the mind observes the universe, and models it. Does the Bean have a mind? Come now, we are not idol worshippers here. We approach art not for worship but for catharsis; not to see something else, but to see ourselves.  We come to art to identify so intensely with it that when its heart breaks, when its brain breaks, we too are cracked open. So the pulsing, overwhelming mindfulness of the Bean is, in fact, our own mind, electrically shuddering as it consumes an entire city.

So what is this essential transformation which occurs as the Bean absorbs Chicago?

All of the straight lines curve. Witness the intrusion of another world into our own. In this world, mighty skyscrapers bend, steel and stone and glass shimmer and dance. The Bean allows us to see that Chicago-as-it-is is not eternal, that new things can happen in the world. The Bean returns to us the comprehension that things, be they never so great, can still be otherwise.

This is the tremendous, fundamental power of the Bean, its anti-sclerotic effect. The revival of youth, in men and nations alike, is not a matter of earrings punched in wrinkled ears, or thinning hair coaxed into ponytails. It is a matter of regaining that sense that things could be other than what they are. This deep sense underlies the creativity of children, the children who built our great cities. And Anish Kapoor has imported that sense back into Chicago, the most august of our cities.

This alone would be enough. But it is not all. The upper surface of the Bean, the one that reflects the city, has elliptic geometry - parallel lines converge. The backside, so to speak, of elliptic geometry is hyperbolic geometry, where parallel lines diverge:

Elliptic geometry is always very pretty; while hyperbolic geometry is a messy story.

L to R: very pretty, messy story

The Bean does not have an elliptic upper surface alone. It also has a hyperbolic lower surface. And it is a messy story.

Kapoor has even ensured that the tiles beneath the Bean form a cartesian grid, so that its distortions in the hyperbolic underside of the Bean are very explicit.

From the straight-lined real Chicago, one arrives in Millennium Park, and is charmed by the curving virtual Chicago. And then one enters into - what? What is this?

What is this madness?

This is, to me, Kapoor's full statement on childlike creativity. The elliptic Bean returns to us the world as visualized by our childlike selves: mutable, sparking with potential, fluid in form. But the hyperbolic Bean illustrates the childlike mind itself: an infolding maze, untraceable - frightening - shocking and alien.

I see the hyperbolic Bean as saying - "Yes, you may have back the abnormal inventiveness and vigor of your infancy; you may have back your imagination and your industry. But nothing is free. You cannot have these things you need, without giving up the things which comfort you. You cannot go on traveling your familiar roads, and mumbling your stock phrases, and conducting your affairs in a warm and sleepy haze. You can still make great things, but you must embrace danger to do it. The danger is the certainty that you will not remain yourself. You yourself will become the perfect thing which has arrived from another planet."

me in hyperbolic space

No doubt Kapoor was not, in fact, thinking these very things when he was designing the Bean. But consider how much easier it would have been just to give the goddamned thing a flat bottom. 100 tons of steel, balanced on two nimble feet instead of one fat ass.

Kapoor called it "Cloud Gate," and indeed one passes under it as through a gate. The gate might not mean what I see in it, but it means something. And the object has such terrific strangeness and force that it forces thoughtfulness upon you. This is my sketch of my own thoughts in confrontation with the Bean. But if the Bean has anything to say, it is that things could be otherwise. My idea is not your idea. I encourage you, when next you are in Chicago, to experience your own unique strain of liberation in the company of the Bean.

Art Is Not A Vector It Is A Field

Last time, we were discussing a particular piece, The Only Way Out is Up, by abstract sculptor Jesse Soodalter, and I had quite a lot to say about what I saw in the piece. This post will really only make sense if you head back and read it - it's the part of this post below the final graphic.

Soodalter, when she read it, liked it fairly well, but she had a couple of points of disagreement. Let's look at the piece again:

Jesse Soodalter, The Only Way Out is Up, 

found object (asphalt), gold-colored aluminum wire, paper, October 2012

Here's Soodalter's first disagreement:

...the two interventions that you describe, while I agree that conceptually they're independent or at least distinct, in actual act are one gesture. The object is literally sewn to the paper with wire, not wrapped and then affixed. As I say, it doesn't invalidate the distinctness of those two axes, but it is quite important to (my own vision of) the nature of the piece that the object is bound to the paper, and embellished in the binding, not decorated and then mounted. Does that make sense?

Yes, of course it makes sense. Thinking it over, I realized that my list of interventions was incomplete: I talked about 1. the wrapping of the object in wire, and 2. the fixing of the object to the paper. But there was a prior intervention, intervention 0: surveying a field of garbage, of rubble, Soodalter saw this object. This object spoke to her, and she spoke back to it. She pulled it from the trash, and said, "There is something important to this one." In one sense, this is really the only important intervention; everything else just pretties up that initial recognition.

Now here is Soodalter's second disagreement:

The wire is as much there to constrain as to exalt, there's a sharpness and a punitive edge that is very much intrinsic to the piece – and to all the wire work, really; the diametric polysemy of wire is a huge part of my obsession with it.

Polysemy, by the way, is linguistic-theory talk for something like the concept I'm pursuing with this blog post overall. It's a term for a sign that has multiple related meanings; Soodalter, as I understand her, and I could be wrong, uses the phrase "diametric polysemy" to suggest that wire means some things, and other related things which are actually opposites of the first things - in this instance, the pinioning cruelty she describes is opposed to the benedictive gentleness I described.

What it amounts to is that you could say I got my entire interpretation wrong - I misunderstood how Soodalter made the work, I misunderstood the significance of how the work was made, and also I took the meaning of the work for the opposite of what Soodalter thought it was about.

You could say I got my interpretation wrong; but this is not the best way to put it. Soodalter, after all, liked my version. She liked her version too, and her version contradicts my version, but she herself didn't reject my version. What does this mean? Does it mean that The Only Way Out is Up doesn't mean anything at all? Of course not. But what we are talking about by meaning in art is not, I think, the same as our normal impression of the idea of meaning. That's what I've been considering and why I'm writing to you today.

As you know, I will never propose a simple idea when a complicated one will do, or use two words instead of ten. Plus also I like math. So let's consider the difference between a vector and a vector field.

A vector is a mathematical construct which includes magnitude and direction:

 

a vector

They're very handy for representing things like forces. A force applied to a cart, for instance, gives it a push, a push with both magnitude and direction. A vector is well adapted for representing this situation.

Let's say instead of little Bobby pushing his Radio Flyer, though, we're talking about an electromagnet.

Like Bobby, an electromagnet produces force. Unlike Bobby, its force isn't a single vector tied to a single location in space (the handlebar of the cart). The electromagnet's force influences everything around it. For every point in space surrounding the electromagnet, a vector exists, waiting to act on amenable matter. This phenomenon is called a field. In this case, it is a vector field.

a simplified diagram of a vector field 

(simplified in the sense that not every point in the area has its vector illustrated)

The claim I am seeking to advance here is that the experience of art is more like a field than it is like a vector. Art itself is more like the electromagnet than it is like little Bobby. An adequate art object will mean the same thing to all viewers. A really impressive art object will mean many things to many viewers. Its purpose is not to create a single meaning, but to create a kind of aesthetic matrix which supports the discovery of meaning. Not just any meaning - but meaning of a sufficiently dense and profound variety to prove rewarding to the effort a viewer puts into looking at it.

My interpretation of Soodalter's sculpture was like one vector, and Soodalter's interpretation of her sculpture was like a second vector. They didn't match up at all because we were standing in different places relative to the work. The work was powerful enough to generate a vector field around itself, waiting for a viewer to wander into it. This vector field was of a quality sufficient to inspire thoughts which were important to me, and different thoughts which were important to Soodalter. It won't inspire thoughts in all people, just as not all matter can receive a push from the magnetic forces generated around an electromagnet. That's fine. We've talked before about different people having different tastes, and this is one way of phrasing that. It's using ten words to say "abstract art talks to some people and not to others." This distinction doesn't make anyone better, or worse, only different.

Legitimacy

Here, this is something very interesting which came up in correspondence with abstract sculptor Jesse Soodalter. She wrote:

...although I've admired many different kinds of art, figurative and otherwise, for a million years, it wasn't until I had a kind of damascene realization of the power and, in some sense, legitimacy of abstraction that I began to conceive of myself as any kind of creator of visual art.

It took me a short while, and then I realized I recognized this sentiment; I recognized it very precisely and completely, so much that I could narrow my damascene moment to sometime between September 27 and November 8, 2003.

At that time, I was in Los Angeles, going to life drawing in Santa Monica on Tuesdays and in Los Feliz on Thursdays, and generally screwing around with drawing and painting and calling myself a student of art. I didn't quite feel that I was ready to call myself an artist. But I was definitely a student of art.

When I was a kid, my mom had a book of Francesco Clemente around the house, which I never opened, but I do remember the cover, because you're not gonna forget that face or that font.

So I was vaguely aware of the existence of Clemente from a young age. In 1998, I saw this movie, "Great Expectations," which when you think about it isn't that good a movie, except for the spellbinding artwork attributed to the artist main character, Finn...

ripped off from here

...and the amazing integration of the actual artist into the cinematography, so that Ethan Hawke as Finn, and the hands of the artist actually making the artwork, cut together beautifully.

Ethan Hawke, artist

we all totally look like that

After I saw it, I looked up who this amazing artist was, and lo and behold, it was Francesco Clemente. Best decision Cuarón made in that film, I thought. From then on, Clemente had a specific, if relatively unexamined, place in my mind - the guy who does the very recognizable big-eye portraits and totemic images.

totemic image

On this basis, I went to see his show at Gagosian/LA in the fall of 2003, sometime between September 27 and November 8. This show did not, ahem, exhibit him at his best. Mostly because the set-piece artworks were enormous paintings done on denim.

Francesco Clemente, Liberation Self Portrait, 2000, mixed media on denim

14 goddamned feet tall by 14 OMG and a half feet wide

This is one of those things that's really only obvious in hindsight, but it turns out denim is a shitty medium for Francesco Clemente to work on. It looked blotchy, contrasty, unsubtle, and stupid.

Also, there were some small watercolors in the back room.

I did, however, have a revelation in that show which was a turning point in my life as an artist, and it would not have happened if the work had been good. It had to be bad for the point to be clear. The point was this: no matter what he was doing, Clemente's work radiated self-confidence. It said, "I made this, it is my art, I will not explain myself, and if you don't like it, fuck you."

When the work is good, you can mix up its self-confidence and the quality of the work itself. They only manifest separately when there's really no excuse for the work apart from the reckless assertion of the artist that you're going to damn well look at it. It swaggered. Clemente's work swaggers, it is downright Captain Kirkish. It can be insufferable, but there is no mistaking it for something apart from what it is.

I realized that without this forceful assertion, this possibly swaggering awareness of your classification as an artist, it did not matter how good you got; you weren't going to be making art. I had been holding off calling myself an artist because I lacked confidence in my skill and my vision. I thought, "Well, I need to learn to draw and paint better; I need to figure out what I want to say." And here Clemente was telling me:

"Screw that - you already know everything you need to know, you're avoiding the issue by claiming you don't know what you want to say. Take responsibility for yourself and start making the work. In fact, Maidman, let me quote to you the immortal words of Xenophon, Anabasis, book III:

"'Why am I lying here? The night advances; with the day, it is like enough, the enemy will be upon us. If we are to fall into the hands of the king, what is left us but to face the most horrible of sights, and to suffer the most fearful pains, and then to die, insulted, an ignominious death? To defend ourselves—to ward off that fate—not a hand stirs: no one is preparing, none cares; but here we lie, as though it were time to rest and take our ease. I too! What am I waiting for? A general to undertake the work? And from what city? Am I waiting till I am older myself and of riper age? Older I shall never be, if today I betray myself to my enemies.'

"Hear the moral of it, Maidman, for it is this: make a decision. Your decision may be wrong! Look at these christawful denim paintings - that was a bad decision. But it is better to make a bad decision than to make no decision at all. From a bad decision, we lurch on to a better decision. From no decision, we waver along an endless road of indecision. Your studies are finished; you are an artist. Make art."

All these things Francesco Clemente said to me, and I listened to what Clemente said. I changed what I was thinking about, or rather, how I was thinking about what I was thinking about. The revelation was a revelation of legitimacy, just as Soodalter described in her own damascene realization. It was in reaction to it that I finally made that leap, and became an artist.

I did not make art right away. Early the next year, I began; a friend commissioned a painting, of whatever I liked. I decided, for painting #1, to do a female nude. This has perhaps set a pattern that has persisted. At the time, I had been working with burnt sienna and white for a while, but I had no real idea how to paint, or how to color, or anything.  So I bought John Howard Sanden's Portraits from Life in 29 Steps. I was worried I would wind up painting like Sanden, but more worried about my total ignorance. It turned out that Sanden is a tremendous teacher, and, because I was swaggering like an artist, learning from him didn't compromise how I painted at all. Here's a Sanden:

John Howard Sanden, Dr. Kim B. Clark

And here's a detail of my first serious painting, done in response to his instructions for how to paint like him:

Daniel Maidman, Kem (detail), oil on canvas, 48"x24", 2004

Looking at it now, I see a couple of genes of Clemente thrown into the mix. But this is the first time I've thought of that.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became an artist. Let me return to Soodalter's story for a minute. She writes about it beautifully, more beautifully than I have here:

For me it was a specific Rothko.  Having never really thought about him--or indeed Abstract Expressionism at all--much before, I wandered into a room at the Art Institute of Chicago and found myself faced with this painting,

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Purple, White, and Red), 1953, oil on canvas, 197.5 x 207.7 cm

and out of nowhere it just reached into my chest and yanked, hard enough to make me choke up.  It really was a single transformative moment, and it unroofed some profound sink of emotional and aesthetic responsiveness to abstraction that has been the absolute and literal making of me as an artist.  It took time to root, and lots of tentative and sheepish but infatuated gestures, before I found my voice, so to speak, with the object and wire pieces.  That came very much with getting into Arte Povera too, that sense of a kind of profane sanctification of objects/spaces/events by the means of the artist's attention.

This is a piece by Soodalter:

Jesse Soodalter, The Only Way Out is Up, found object (asphalt), copper wire, paper, October 2012

Now, I don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about abstract art. I don't have a good sense of the terms of debate and discussion. But there is something that is so perfectly correct to my eye to this.

There is the found object, pure matter, close to the alchemical prima materia - raw, cruel, base, meaningless.

Then there is the first level of intervention by the artist, the wrapping of the object in a gold-colored wire. This wrapping is the sanctification of which Soodalter speaks. The eye of the artist perceives the object, the palm holds it, the soul blesses it - and the fingers express the blessing with wire. The artist interacts with the object at the most visceral, physical level.

Then there is a second intervention, the fixing of the object to the paper. This to me is the equivalent, by means of reason, of the first emotional-spiritual intervention. First the heart and hand absorbed the object, now the mind does too. The paper is flat space, the cartesian plane, the page of text. The sanctified object becomes part of the map of the universe in the mind of the artist. It is set in its right place, here and not there.

This minuscule thing records the confrontation between the human presence and the universe: a confrontation characterized on the human side, for Soodalter, by fascination, love, and ultimately, integration.

That's what I see in these humble materials. But part of the reason I see that at all in a jumble of stuff which I might otherwise overlook is that Soodalter has passed through the revelation of legitimacy. You are walking along, and you pass by her, and she holds up her hand and says, "Stop. Thou shalt look. This is art."

It is essential for the artist to have the revelation of legitimacy, to learn to make the assertion. You can make the assertion and still be wrong. But if you don't make the assertion, you can't be right.

Parthenogenesis: Self-as-Symbol in Lauren Levato's 'Wunderkammer'

This previously appeared at Huffington. No additional text is included here. But it will lead to some posts down the road, because it treats a topic I'm thinking about a lot right now.

Also, the artwork in this post is so insanely awesome.

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Lauren Levato is a Chicago artist who previously specialized in bugs.

Lauren Levato, Longhorn No. 2, 12" x 9", drawn with a single No. 2 pencil from Walgreens on paper, 2009

She had been working toward making the emotional and intellectual resonances she sees in bugs pictorially explicit:

Lauren Levato, From the Bodies of Dead Horses, graphite on Bristol, 2011

But it is only very recently that she has made a breakthrough. Having tackled some personal issues, she was suddenly able to make self-portraits. And her outlook, grounded in the methodical qualities of scientific illustration, opened a very interesting path:

Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Thief in the Night, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

This could be a one-off until you look at a second one:

 Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Hex, 17" x 14", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

In these drawings, called "Wunderkammer," she incessantly repeats not only herself as an image, but more or less the same pose and the same gaze at the viewer. What is the significance of this?

When you have an encrypted but repeating signal, you can try to decrypt it by examining changing and fixed elements in the system of which the signal is a part. Levato herself is fixed in her drawings - what varies?

The imagery varies. It varies a lot - like the cabinets of curiosities after which the series is named, she includes diverse animals and manufactured objects:

Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as St. John the Baptist, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

But the variation takes place within a certain set of constant rules. They are all full-length nude self-portraits done with spare, elegant lines. They all involve animals and odd hairdos, and most depict Levato with unorthodox items in her womb.

Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as My Sister's Keeper, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

Evaluated in this light, we begin to see that Levato's image construction follows only the most basic rules of visual grammar. The sophistication of the work results not from visual grammar, but from linguistic grammar. Each of these paintings is a sentence:

"I am Lauren Levato, and I am [ ] and [ ] and [ ] and that involves [ ] and [ ]."

They are elaborated reflections on the consequences of a series of self-recognitions. The titles reflect this.

It would be very easy to classify this work with the various other instances of pop surrealism which currently abound. I think this would be a mistake. Surrealism, in its original instances and even more so in its current degenerate resurrection, is dedicated to the peculiar, the allegedly unconscious, and the dreamlike, for their own sakes. This is a strength and a weakness. The weakness is that it too eagerly indulges an exclusive focus on preference, or taste, or style.

Levato's objects and arrangements are categorically surrealistic, but they are not ends in themselves. Like her self-image, they are words in her language. Just as her self-image is halfway to a Chaplinesque caricature, so her objects have been partly emptied out of their self-contained meanings and character, in order to fit more smoothly into their relations with one another. The meaning of her work emerges from its total composition, not any one part of it.

What is this language she creates? What is the meaning of her work?

I think she is producing a rare form of a common psychological inversion among artists. All art has an expressionist component - the revelation of the interior life of the artist, their state of mood and thought, the progress of their soul. All art serves, to some extent, as an exteriorization of this interior state, as the objective correlative outlined by T. S. Eliot in Hamlet and His Problems:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

And yet, while this element is common, and even emphasized among, you know, the expressionists -

awooga!

(Odilon Redon, The Crying Spider, 1881)

- it is, generally speaking, disorderly and inchoate, a matter of a self-willed passionate disposition violently expressing itself through bizarre imagery.

Levato, on the other hand, designs her work with a meditative calm. Emerging from science, she applies an artistic equivalent of the dissectionist's practice: the bloodiest of matter, the most methodical of excavations. Her image-objects are partly defined complex symbols representing internal states. She has developed the ability to relate important visuals in her life to specific aspects of her own state of being. She has thus laid portent on top of physicality, and trained herself to draw in a way that conveys both the likeness and the portent - "This is not itself, it is the substitute for something else." And she has also trained herself to detach, once each exploratory surgery is complete, from the brutal work of conjoining the interior and exterior worlds. Having detached, she can lucidly convey the results. She's got the tastes of a tiger and the sensibilities of a lab assistant.

In some of the drawings, certain symbols are immediately decipherable, as in the Self Portrait as Forgetting:

Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Forgetting, 12" x 12", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

Here black ribbons are monstrously large versions of the strings children are told to tie around their fingers, to remember. In other pieces, though, the set of symbols defies simple analysis:

Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Caul, 17" x 14", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

Yes, I know what a caul is, and I'm still not going to claim I get it.

But this is important - that sometimes I should be unable to get it. It is exactly when the symbol is indecipherable that its nature as a symbol is most evident. The falcon, nest, horns, and hair/cape clearly form a network of symbols. They mean something to Levato; they don't need to mean anything to us. What we receive is the unnerving imminence of the perplexing but loaded symbol, the threatening authoritativeness of the Tarot. We are not traveling on Levato's path; her art is not the same as her path. Our path with her art is an experience of the intellectual and emotional texture of Levato's journey. We see her walking. We do not see, entirely, where she walks.

 Lauren Levato, Self Portrait as Capricorn, 17" x 14", colored pencil and graphite on Bristol, 2012

There is only one other artist I can think of who has developed something analytically similar to this - Frida Kahlo, of course. But because Kahlo and Levato both generate absolutely sincere, personal symbol-systems, their work bears next to no resemblance on the level of content or appearance.

Kahlo's work expresses in rigorous formal terms a journey that is heated and violent, that careens between sensual pleasures and agonies, nearly undone with a self-regard so intense that the work threatens to replace a life forever in the process of becoming unlivable.

Levato's journey is cool and composed; we join her at the very end of that fiery compression which transforms graphite into diamond. She cannot bear to express any image before it has completed such a metamorphosis. In the aftermath of the violence, her images occupy a fairy-tale landscape, an uncanny semiotic world - forms, previously invisible, reveal themselves: animals and ribbons, jewelry and hair.

I called this body of work parthenogenetic because parthenogenesis is the manufacture of offspring without fertilization. In "Wunderkammer," Levato impregnates herself with herself, filling her symbol-womb with her symbol-objects. Again, the meaning of each of these objects is not really any of our business. Our business is that her work is compelling; it is airily weird; it is perfected and honest in its difficult conception and flawlessly elegant in its execution. Confronting it, our head fills with interesting thoughts, and our feet float a millimeter or two off the floor.

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"Wunderkammer" at Packer Schopf Gallery, Jan. 11-Feb. 16, 942 W. Lake St., Chicago, IL, 60607
Opening reception Friday, Jan. 11, 5-8 p.m. (you missed this, but that's alright, I'm including it for completeness's sake)

"Wunderkammer" images courtesy of Packer Schopf Gallery
Lauren Levato online:
 laurenlevato.com

facebook.com/laurenlevato
Twitter/Instagram: hioctaneredhead

Dragon Skin

So this painting, which is for a friend, was an unbelievable sonofabitch to complete:

Daniel Maidman, An Octopus, oil on panel, 12"x12", 2013

Suckers, textured skin, the works - it took forever. It brought vividly to my mind an idea I have had, occasionally, for many years. I first had this idea when I stumbled on a sleeping chameleon in a hedge in Israel. The chameleon had turned white while sleeping, which seems like a poor idea from a survival perspective, but he's the professional. I had a chance to study him closely for a while. When he woke up, he turned green again.

He might not have been a he, I don't know.

The idea I had was this - human skin is fairly low in detail. We are low-detail organisms. Imagine if we had descended from lizards, or birds; if we had feathers or scales, or large-scale complex pigmentations, or involved edges. Our entire art history would have been different. We would either have had to commit more time to each picture and sculpture, or make due with a more stylized, reduced-detail visual paradigm from the very start.

Actually, reflecting on it now, my friend rupa dasGupta, who has been drawing an octopus every day since 2010, at the appropriately-titled http://anoctopusaday.tumblr.com/, has been confronting this problem continuously. Her project can be read as a set of experiments in the question of detail: its representation, interpretation, aesthetics, and reduction.

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My thought is not a very interesting thought, because art would also be different if we could see the polarization of light, or ultraviolet, or radio. Or if oil were highly volatile. Or if the electron had a different mass.

I'm just saying. Feathers and scales. That would be fucked up.

Thank you very much.

The Patron Saint of Hunger

The other day I went to the Met to see the last day of the Bernini show. On my way to the Bernini section, I had one of those art museum experiences which I find essential to my well-being as an artist.

Here's what happened. I went the long way around, passing through the medieval and early Renaissance galleries on the second floor. I glanced to my right, and this is what I saw:

This is Bartolomeo Montagna's (no, I never heard of him either) oil-on-wood "Saint Justina of Padua," painted, as nearly as I can tell from the museum label, between his birth before 1459 and his death in 1523.

Saint Justina here hit me like a solid punch to the gut. I had a jaw-dropping, soft-legged sensation of ringing stillness. I was being overpowered by the beauty of this painting: the compact rounded clarity of the depiction, the model's force of virtue, intelligence, insight, and wit, and Montagna's gorgeous technique.

I don't go to art museums often enough. They say you can't just invent art out of your own head, without reference to history. This is less true than you would think. I have gone through a very long period of studying some of our art heritage very intensely. But I have also sequestered myself intensely from it for a time, and my new pictorial ideas build, as much as anything, on my older pictorial ideas. Fortunately for me, I'm either very good or deluded enough to believe I'm very good. So I do not perceive myself, moment by moment, becoming impoverished by living in my solipsistic art referential universe.

Then, after a long absence, I go to the Met, or the National Gallery, or someplace like that. And it is just shocking. Here is simply magnificent work, the wealth of age upon age of discipline, inspiration, and genius.

If you are not an artist, your experience of attending an art museum will be different from mine, just as a musician's experience of a musical performance is different from that of a music fan.

If you are an artist, when you are just starting out, the work in art museums - the really good stuff - seems miraculous, it seems to be a unitary phenomenon on the far side of an unbridgeable abyss. Your ambition is to earn your own spot in these museums, these treasure-houses, and yet you despair of ever earning such a spot, because of the magnificence of the existing residents.

Your despair, however, inspires you. You start down the long road of your training, to see if you can rise so high as to reach up and touch the drapery, trailing below these gods as they circle the empyrean.

You study and work for years and years, and that unitary miracle you saw begins to come into focus, and as it focuses, it separates. Now you see that this incredible work is not immortal only; like the Greek heroes, it is the offspring of a union of mortal and immortal parents.

The immortal parent is vision. Vision is beyond your control as a would-be artist. You have it, or you do not. You can gain and lose it; it will come and go as it will. All you can do is prepare yourself to receive it, and even so, nobody has found a method for this preparation which is more successful, in terms of statistical significance, than just getting drunk like an asshole every night.

The mortal parent is technique. This, you can gain, and in fact, much of what you are spending all those years and years on is refining and improving your technique.

As your technique improves, it will begin to match the work you have admired in museums. You will not want to admit this to yourself; it will seem sacrilegious. But recognizing what is so is part of being reasonable. Technique is mortal. You can train hard enough to beat it. I can paint as well as, say, the bottom quintile of the painters in the Met. And my technique is not as good as that of dozens of painters I know, many of them annoyingly younger than I am. Technique is difficult, but not impossible. Some of it derives from talent, but without practice, talent doesn't amount to much.

Now you go back to the museum, and you have lost the innocent awe of the art lover or the aspirer to art-making. You're an artist, and you spend a lot of time squinting at particular passages in paintings, decoding the methods of their creation. You admire the flow of compositions. You make notes on bits to steal.

You begin to evaluate vision, to say, "My vision is as strong as this, but not yet as strong as that." You know it is foolish, that this kind of evaluation is notoriously biased, unreliable, and best done in the long light of centuries. But you cannot resist. You are still ambitious.

You have gained a great deal, but you have lost a great deal as well. You are jaded; there are scales on your eyes. You have looked at so much art that you are blinded to art.

This is a hazard of the profession. We are like bouncers at the strip club of the soul.

This is my experience of it, anyway. There is nothing in this sequence I have not undergone, the pointless vanities and stinging disappointments alike. You know I am ambitious, and I am doing my best to share with you the convolutions of my ambitious road...

So all of this explains the tremendous importance, the absolutely vital importance, of the sensation of being punched in the gut. This is the return of the original interaction with great art, the reminder of the might and grandeur of the thing. It is the humiliation that redeems the drudgery and the vanity, that renews the challenge of the majesty of the project, of us, we ourselves, when we look up from the mud.

My sensation of this sucker punch was different from what it used to be. It used to be, "I will never make such great work." Now it is, "I will never make this great work." This is an astonishing leap in assertion, and it was surprising to me how highly I regarded my work. But it would not do to make a false report. My sensation was not of an essential incapacity, but of an essential lack. Whatever I ever do, I will never paint Montagna's Saint Justina; Montagna already did. I will never paint any one of these masterpieces. I might paint masterpieces, but they will not be these, they will be some other ones. These are no longer available.

Since, it would seem, my craving has the same borders as the universe, this unavailability struck me like the pang of a hunger that cannot be fed. It was a terrible feeling, an abrupt sense of envy and loss. It was actually the reverse of that impulse to paint which I described in Credo - I saw what Montagna loved, and loved it too, and could not perform that conversion of adoration into paint which is so central to my experience. I became Montagna, but with my hands cut off, my tongue cut out, an incapable Montagna. My craving burned me.

And this - this is enough! I have worked to become mighty, and every inch of might I conquered cost me an inch of wonder. It is no good to live without wonder. I've got plenty of wonder about plenty of things, but less about art, and I need to have wonder about art to remain an artist. So this experience, this discovery, is vastly reassuring. The wonder moved, and hid, and finally, it re-emerged. Its quantity is undiminished. The inner circle of wonder that I cannot make so great a thing has narrowed, but the outer circle, of wonder at things I might possibly have made but did not, is greater in area. It is a savage lack, a gnawing absence. It is the very hunger I am always worrying about losing. Saint Justina teaches that the true hunger is unfeedable.