Kate Writes

On the desk where I sat I’d placed a stack of exhibition statements. As the days passed, hands pulled from the pile, and ten sheets became a single one which I guarded. In time, creases appeared on the page. Dots from moisture wrinkled; edges began to curl. Printed were the words Kate Butler and ECHO’S ANSWER, and below that a paragraph in which I attempted to thread together the disparate works under the single title. Occasionally and with cynicism I’d think of the statement as an epitaph: an end point, although not a permanent one. It wouldn’t be long before this collection of things I made would exit the gallery and, as it was my hope, disperse into the homes of different buyers. They would depart the ensemble, leave the gravitational forcefield of the story I had told about them. The statement might stay on my website indefinitely, but it was only temporarily a functional document.

The story I told concerned my relationship to my mediums: how I used them, and what for. In one line I compared them to the walls of a canyon: “physical planes against which the human voice finds its place within the immensity of nature.” I spoke of paper and clay as resonant surfaces, reflecting and transforming the energy I brought to them by way of my hands. I compared my artworks to echoes. An echo was like an impression –  what art historian Richard Shiff called “a phenomenon of nature and the artist’s own being” – but different, describing an event that takes place outside in open space rather than in the mind. The echo also invoked transience, that reality of life on earth that I felt compelled to reckon with through drawing and sculpture, despite and because of their stillness.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise and yet it did: that the vehicle for this body of work, the gallery show, was subject to the very passing of time that I’d felt I was assuaging by building static, physical forms. In the hours sitting at that desk, nursing my desperation, I thought with envy about whoever built those Roman monuments, whoever carved those ancient cathedral façades. I envied the physical permanence of these formats, but more than that their participation in rituals for which the gaze of the individual passer-by was incidental. Ancient Egyptians made paintings in tombs that were never intended to be viewed by hundreds of people from Art History textbooks: they were rather meant to shepherd and sustain the deceased into the next life. Archaic Greek artisans carved figures like the Kore and Koroi, male and female youths not for display but devotion: honoring, at gravesites and temples, departed souls as well as beings never subjected to the vagaries of time. Even that statue of Marcus Aurelius – his hand outstretched, horse’s leg forever about to crest down – seemed to appeal not to the people mulling about the Piazza del Campidiglio but to a profounder, more omniscient gaze: the gaze of history, or that of God.

We still have monuments and graveyards, churches and civic buildings. Art, though, is by and large defined these days by its independence from any ideology beyond the artist’s personal belief system; from any agreed upon social function beyond to be looked at in a gallery, and then sold. The best art is beholden to nothing but the artist’s individual capacity for revelation. And so to make art requires faith in one’s own vision; faith in what can be discovered through making and looking. Faith, that the act or vision realized – for me on a sheet of paper or in hard, fired clay – is a reward enough for one’s efforts. Faith that each other’s attention is enough.

On vernacular architecture and the sculptures of Stanley Rosen, on whom I would later write my master’s thesis - Fall 2017 

One weekend while I was living in southern France, I joined my art school on a field trip to study the bories - ancient stone huts once used as agricultural storehouses, weathered across centuries by the Mediterranean sun. We found one nestled in a forest teeming with dry stems, bordered on one end by a stone wall that opened in the path of an entrance. The center of the hut, a dome constructed by limestones sourced from the earth we stood on, was accessed by way of a bended passageway. Light diffused through cracks. Chatter yielded to silence.  

The circular wall around us - in fact the whole structure - was continuous with the ceiling: a perfect dome of rocks balanced concentrically without mortar. For those of us who grew up within walls whose supports were hidden beneath plaster and paint, it seemed there was nothing to prevent the circular opening at top from collapsing. 

Yet it was this very precariousness that impressed me with a sense of the structure’s integrity. The vaulted ceiling stood completely by the weight of one stone on another, the precision of which lent the walls a lightness more indicative of strength than of frailty. There was an urgency to this construction: to shelter, to safeguard and to store. Yet to us the space lacked any function but as the subject of our observation. Our sense of its poetry was heightened. Dream associations surfaced; its sheltering became symbolic. So did the context in which it dwelled. A beehive of time-weathered stones, the borie offered a point of reference for the fluctuating light and the undulating wind; emphasizing their instantaneity while bringing to mind the thousands of years past through which it had. 

The hours that followed were infused with a profound feeling, akin to something I might feel after encountering a great work of art. Vernacular structures can be particularly moving because of the distinctness of their expression, evidencing the specific environment and needs of a culture of people. The more idiosyncratic, the more they convey that beyond their functionality, architectural spaces have the power to inhabit our imagination even as we inhabit them. Gaston Bachelard notably explored their poetic typology in “Poetics of Space” - describing such spaces as the wardrobe (“a model of intimacy”) as well as the basement, the nest and shells. Describing the phenomenon of “roundness,” he reflects, “sometimes we find ourselves in the presence of a form that guides and encloses our earliest dreams” (239). Bachelard uses the word “enclose” both to mean a concentration of concrete space and the concentration of thought. 

“A form that guides and encloses our earliest dreams” might describe the borie. Yet even more so does Bachelard’s internalizing of space shed light on the ceramic sculptures of Stanley Rosen - primal, kinetic, shadow-inflected objects that I first encountered at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects (SHFAP) in October. Rosen’s work could, not unfairly, be situated in the context of mid-century abstraction or experiments with clay à la Peter Voulkos. But his work might be more profoundly considered in relationship to vernacular architecture - the type of building rooted in human needs and rituals, attuned to the affordances not just of the material but of the earth and the wind, of water and sunlight or as the case may be, fire.  

The obvious difference is in size. Rosen’s sculptures recall an amalgam of architectural motifs - huts, boats and temples, antechambers and entrances - but in a small scale that locates them in proportion to the searching hands of the artist. Because they can’t be inhabited, they invite the mind’s eye to feel through them. To encounter these spaces as symbols. Constructed of raw, earthen clay bodies, Rosen’s sculptures internalize that sort of timeless, intuitive construction that I was so compelled by in the borie in forms that are at once idiosyncratic and original.

Throughout the works at SFAP, textured outer surfaces that yield to inner depths. A monumental goblet opens to an inner space of thin ridges like roof tiles in reverse, lined and woven to the bottom. Stare into the outer wall of one of his towering jugs and you might be struck by the little doorways in or the shadows between the base and the roof. At one level, they are riffing of a necessity of the medium of clay, which must be hollow in order to be fired. Inasmuch as ceramics is defined by containment, it is defined by its openings through which the passage of hot air will turn the objects rock solid. A few pieces, as grids and bushels of thin narrow clay rolls ask us to consider the mystery of their material density.

Their architecture, in part, concerns the ceremony of their openings: as when the mouth of that monumental goblet blooms from a base one third its size. Often they assume the form of an antechamber or vestibule - the entrance or channel between the outer wall and interior. Two cylindrical vessels, dark brown in color, take in air through slits and incisions in their sides. In one, narrow slaps of clay creep up from the rigged surface of a cup into the support of a cube; its surface decorated grid of square incisions that open into its hollow. The darkest, widest hollows occur on the sides, in the spaces between the slabs from the base and the top into which they rise. In a departure from the usual allowances of a vessel, the top is covered, with that same patchwork of varying depths. The result is a surface that betrays a mysterious, shadowy interior, while denying the viewer full access to the interior life the form claims to be protecting. 

Scottish painter Andrew Cranston has said that his subject is “something like history…personal histories, but also little pockets of history that are there. Like I always hear, for example, where someone was when JFK was shot, or something like that.”

There are no allusions to historical events in Cranston’s paintings. What the artist gets at is something like the experience of history, how the intimate and personal finds its place in the big. In several of the small paintings in the show, done on the backs of hardback books, the shapes of pitchers and vases are nestled, close-up, into the bottom half of a composition wherein the top half or third a faraway house or a horizon line for sea or mountains invokes depth. In Cranston’s large-scale canvasses, too, human figures — resting under trees, sitting in shadow, gazing out from a boardwalk — are positioned in the foreground opposite a receding landscape. In bright mid-tones nestled into surfaces sometimes with bleach, varnish, and rabbit skin glue in addition to oil paint, Cranston counterpoises private life and a wider world, things close enough to touch and distant enough to ponder. In Let’s talk about this story of yours we see distant fields and trees through the tinted windows of the same warm-toned room of oranges, pinks, and blues that encompass the two figures at the table, their forms backlit, nestled into the pattern of the tiled floor. It’s as if everything in the painting appears in proportion to how it has touched the beholder, in the haptic as well as psychological sense. While even what is close has the distance of something dreamed.

From a formal standpoint, Cranston achieves a dream-like depth in his paintings through an emphasis on surface patterning. Within his pallet of vibrant mid-tones, distant clouds appear level with the dotted pattern of a pitcher. As in the paintings of Post-Impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, form arranged with equal tonal intensity across the picture plane lends a sense of encompassing space, and with that time suspended as opposed to progressing toward a single point. Also as in Bonnard or Vuillard, in Cranston’s paintings, it is often domestic, or at least human-centered spaces — beaches, cafés, pathways — that contain the inward gaze. If people aren’t present in a painting, then pitchers, cups, and other kitchenware speak to their imminence. Cats and dogs recur, concentrating Cranston’s expressions of animal comforts.

Of the many animals that appeared throughout the paintings on view, I found myself, at first inexplicably, drawn to a little terrier held by the central figure of “Waiting for the Bell,” the large-scale canvas for which the exhibition is named. Like every other animal we see in Cranston’s paintings, the dog’s figure is nestled into the color or pattern that borders it, which here is the stripped peach sweater of what appeared to be an old woman. Around this figure, Cranston has dappled bleach onto the plum-stained canvas creating dots of light that vary in intensity from pink to almost white, like fireflies or a film strip devolving by splotches in the seconds before it slips out the reel and runs blank. To the figure’s left, small magenta rectangles, faint within the pink of the canvas, make a receding path to a man standing with his back to us, his shirt a little blue square. As elsewhere in Cranston’s paintings, this scene invokes a recession in depth. Yet it appears within reach compared to the cosmic space effected by the bleach-dots, receding into and projecting out from around the woman’s seated, stable form. A table of chairs inscribed in faint lines of bleach to her right appear semi-transparent, like a memory near to being forgotten.

While in ways the strangest work on view, Waiting for the Bell concentrates that tension between the closeness and distance that runs through the exhibition. Whatever the bleach-dots recall or signify, the distance they portray feels absolute. Without that little white dog, the woman painted at the center would appear unmoored, floating in space. In Cranston’s paintings, that which is the most intimate, the most tactile, often holds the most weight.

For all the legibility of Cranston’s subject matter, it’s his use of materials that lies his paintings’ real power of suggestion. In addition to bleach and rabbit-skin glue, Cranston paints in distemper, a matte, chalky medium, and varnish, which lends some of his works a sheen. The effect of these is evident in the small works in particular which have been rendered on old hardback book covers, found objects with unique material identities rooted both in their make and their age. While the large canvasses envelop the viewer in the image, these are the size of things you could hold in your hands. Their surfaces are textured: in one painting, thick globs of shiny varnish, peppered with bumps, encases an image of a woman holding a cigarette in a café, evoking the slickness of her cup and the sheen of the window behind her. In another, a thin wash of bleach reveals the grain of the book cover as it depicts the light in a night scene. Colors are matte and then shiny, thick or thin, evoking taste, smell, touch. Here, form is embedded in the painted surface and in the book covers themselves, soft and fragile objects with fraying edges.

On “Peter Voulkos: Stacks” at Burning in Water Gallery. Published in Artefuse, September 2019, Edited 2021

If you go to Peter Voulkos: Stacks, 1969 – 2001 expecting to find much to look at you may be disappointed. On view at Burning in Water Gallery in Chelsea through September 21, the show is comprised of punctured plates and monumental mud and ash-colored vessels which Voulkos has configured through sagging insertions of thick matter brusquely chopped, punctured and slashed. It would not be wrong to call them ugly. Yet it’s not the look of Voulkos’s works that gives them their life, so much as their feel. Impressions of fingers reveal the softness of the clay from which they were first built. Walls sag and bricks lean, records of how they once gave way to gravity. Through it all is the force and speed of Voulkos’s own body: pressing in upon, stacking up and jabbing into what once were once malleable clay slabs. Cast in bronze, the Stacks heroicize the artist’s very act of transforming this humble, once-marginalized material into abstract form.

Born in Montana in 1924, Peter Voulkos achieved a sort of celebrity status in the ceramics world for his active, irreverent approach to traditional ceramic processes and forms, namely the vessel. Added to his innovations in ceramic art, Voulkos made his mark as an educator, founding the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute, now the Otis College of Art and Design, before teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. At Otis, he taught and worked alongside other male artists who were exploring ceramics as an art form, among them John Mason, Paul Soldner and Kenneth Price. With Voulkos’s leadership, the Otis group challenged and expanded the expressive possibilities for ceramic sculpture, asserting its relevance to the American art world as form of art. 

While it’s possible Voulkos and the Otis group get too much credit for transforming a craft form in to a respectable medium of contemporary art, they unavoidably have become the standard-bearers for mid-century ceramic sculpture. Voulkos’s work featured predominantly in a seminal 1961 article, “The New Ceramic Presence,” which compared the innovations of ceramic artists those of abstract expressionist painters. The author, Craft Horizons editor Rose Slivka, observed that American ceramic artists at the time, like abstract expressionists, valued the “artistic validity of spontaneous creative events” — such as the artist’s impulsive construction or accidents in glazing or firing — during the “working process.” Like paint, clay, she observed, is “responsive to the direction and force of the hand and to the touch or with tool; it can be treated as both fluid and solid.” Among the tens of other artists whose work was included in “The New Ceramic Presence,” few made work that embodied the performative, process-oriented aesthetic of “abstract expressionist ceramics” quite as completely as Voulkos, or in such monumental forms. 

As the canvas was to Jackson Pollock, conventional pottery forms were to Voulkos: his fields of action, surfaces on which to inflict expressions of bodily intuition. In his earlier works in the exhibition — ceramic plates and stacks created between 1969 and 1986 — the focus is on destructing thrown pottery forms, perhaps with irreverence, but also to make way for something new. Into one duo of stacked wheel-thrown cylinders, created in 1969 and 1974, Voulkos has incised gestural lines, poked holes large and small and inserted clumps of clay into pockets he has dug out from the surface. In the one from 1974, an inches long, jagged hole reveals the dark hollow of space dwelling beneath the expressive facade. In several of the plates in the exhibition, half of them bronze, the other half ceramic, Voulkos has punctured the surface not from the front but from behind — evoking an internal source of pressure forcing itself outward through the membrane of the clay. In destroying one thing — the utilitarian pot — he reveals other ways that a vessel can mean. 

Out of Voulkos’s destruction of pottery’s archetypal forms came his constructions of new ones. The later stacks in the exhibition, created between 1994 and 2001, are entirely constructed from ceramic bricks and slabs — hand-built rather than assembled from sections thrown on the wheel. Bricks hanging vertically to the upright surface of “Mimbres,” from 2000, which stands, in triumph, despite gravity. In “Isis” from 2001, Voulkos has cut into vertical bricks and wide slabs with square and circular holes, invoking a dialogue between the form’s shadowy interior and its reflective surface. 

Positioned upright like figures, Voulkos’s stacks can be read as bodies parallel to our own. Their once malleable surfaces, impressed with the scribblings of the hand and the weight of the body, function both as skin and bones, shielding and at times revealing the mysterious spaces they hold within. They evoke of the body’s posture, balance and weight, exertion and release, surface attitudes and hidden interiors.  

That the ultimate form of the “Stacks” is bronze rather than fired clay brings these vessels in dialogue with the history of bronze sculpture and with that, sculpture writ large. Historically the medium of public monuments, the bronze renders permanent, even heroic, Voulkos’ impulsive gestures and will to form.  

Yet if the bronze asserts the work’s historical significance, it wasn’t the heroism of the work that stayed with me after departing the show. Rather it was its humility, its origins in wet earth. It was how his plates and stacks gave form to the physical conditions, in the body and in clay, out of which meaning assumes form. Because or in spite of Voulkos’s arrogance, his work still feels fresh. 

Published on Arte Fuse 10/11/2018

Charline von Heyl has compared painting to chasing a dog on a leash. In the presence of any one of her large-scale tableaus at Petzel Gallery, a viewer can only do the same. Von Heyl combines, torques and frames rigid shapes, images of objects, animal and human figures, patterns and motifs, paint drips and scribbles into something like collages of subconscious signals. Like some other contemporary painters, she plays with the syntax of picture-making, inventing images that deal more in dramatic possibilities than in actualities. I am accustomed to asking what a painting is. Von Heyl proposes what a painting can do.  

In the back room of Petzel I am staring at large canvas titled “La Vache Qui Rit,” French for the laughing cow, a moniker that may or may not be a reference to that brand of cheese-to-go (the painting’s predominance of white and red supports this theory). The drama takes place on a sheer white ground (masking a puzzle of shapes) within a square black frame so rigid it could be a photoshop element. Within are black hearts, teardrops, triangles and silhouetted twists which rise the geometric bird-like form that could have been pulled from a decorative sampler. Beneath the black shapes are masses of blood-red and bruise-magenta. As my eye moves from the lower right toward the upper left I see the silhouettes of legs, what might be a bow, the top of a skull, and an upside-down coat of arms. I catch myself interpreting these ambiguous forms as objects, and in so doing become aware of my own viewership. I see myself seeing. A black teardrop shape sits below two open white circles of the skull’s eye, and it looks like crying. I notice another face: an elongated horizontal heart at center becomes the mouth to a hollow eye drawn in charcoal slightly upward to the left. Von Heyl’s paintings conjure up different associations depending on where you look.  

Perhaps the graphic shapes in “La Vache Qui Rit” would not seem so free, so buoyant, had von Heyl not dabbed and flitted her brush in red across the canvas. In black, she has doodled a lattice across the leg shapes and made charcoal squiggles on top. One effect of these markings is to further enrich the painting’s tangled web of associations. On top of the red “scull” in “La Vache Qui Rit” for instance, two parallel dashes further evoke the hollow nose holes of an eyeless face.

Such brushwork also relates the primal energy underlying von Heyl’s more explicit figures and shapes. Throughout the paintings, a cursory mix of drips or scribbles dance across the surface, sometimes contained by more sharply defined forms in the foreground. In “The Flood Subject,” black and lime green teardrop shapes, almost kitsch in their uniformity, emerge from a radio fuzz of black and blue marks. That drag-and-drop sampling of graphic elements could be read as a computer-era update to the expressive vocabulary of free-handed doodling that occupies much of the painting’s ground (think Baldessari in the jungle). Both the uniform shapes and the active brushwork suggest the importance of intuitive play, where poetic meaning is revealed from chance juxtapositions and guileless exertion. Uniting the associations of images with the rhythmic associations of paint drips, scribbles, and strokes, von Heyl’s paintings are both haptic and cerebral, both self-evident in their formal unity and charged with inscrutable meanings.

Wondering where the human subject fits into all this, I see an answer in “Mana Hatta.” In the painting, the silhouettes of two heads appear to overlap, intercepting each other, as well as forming a base for evocations of radio waves and signals. From the hypnosis-eye of the figure at left toward the bottom of the canvas, cartoonish waves meander through black, red and blue. These patterns are overlaid by three outlines of jumping rabbits, punctuated by little stamps of red. No explicit reference is made to Alice in Wonderland, but between the leaping rabbits and target circles for eyes such an association is appropriate.

In writing this review, I return to words associated with sorcery: I want to say that von Heyl ’s works are incantations, or that she conjures or summons. In a recent interview with Jason Farago for Even Magazine von Heyl describes her preoccupation with fabricating new images from “a net of synchronicities and associations,” that, like that dog on a leash, seem to have a will of their own. She says, “the paintings are almost the conclusion of a series of steps of fetishistic projections, which want to find a voice.”

The sort of fetish von Heyl describes, associated in some cultures with voodoo, has its origins in the Portuguese “feitico,” or sorcery, derived from the latin facticius, meaning “artificial” and “facere” to make. Here I admit my ignorance about the actual ritual uses of so-called fetish objects, yet the etymological history of the term is itself revealing. The origins of “fetish” both in “sorcery” and in making confirms a reality that is familiar to many artists: that the medium has a mind of its own. A hallmark of a good painting, or a good image, is that it seems to look back. Von Heyl’s paintings so adhere to their own internal laws that I can imagine them telecommunicating to one another after the gallery lights are off.

Von Heyl’s paintings are strange, compelling new realities. Yet one flip side of their originality is that they are extremely particular, as fetishes, including the sexual kind, tend to be. I want to think that because von Heyl’s paintings are radical and interesting they are also necessarily great, but viewing them only takes me so deep. I felt alienated in the presence of some of her images, either due to the crypticness of their signs (such as “Poetry Machine”) or because of the thinness of the pictorial space. The painting “Corrido,” for instance, selected for the gallery’s front room, left me cold. The work features a black antler shape at the center opening to checkers, layered over decorative motifs and patterns. I wouldn’t say I didn’t like the painting: I liked the hot orange beside the cool yellow, the white drips over black. But the exuberance of the decorative motifs felt spectral and hollow, like garlands from a neoclassical statue framing nothing. My identification with the painting’s theatre of effects was disproportionate to the grandeur of the massive canvas.

Published on The Drawing Center Blog, The Bottom Line, August 2018

At age seventeen, Alberto Giacometti could draw anything. The son of a post-impressionist painter in Italian Switzerland, he had a happy childhood, provided with the resources and education that make a talented boy a prodigy. A self-portrait he made in 1918 portrays a confident young man, posture straight, pen in hand. His penetrating gaze meets the gaze of the viewer. His brows are alert and almost symmetrical, lips parsed, and his hairline is delineated sharply against a broad forehead. Clear and tight are the contour lines he has drawn along the edge of his jacket, hair, and cheek. Between the angular fold of his collar and the elevated turn of his head, he has drawn himself as a master.

Decades later, he would recount to Andre Parinaud that at that age, the world appeared to him whole. In his youth, he experienced no separation between himself and what he saw, which he rendered with ease.

Then something happened. By Giacometti’s account, 1920 was the year the world began to appear stranger, more complex. He was in Rome, and a female friend had agreed to pose for him all winter as he sculpted a bust. At the end of those six months,19-year-old Alberto threw what he’d made in the trash. He could not grasp the head in its unity. He felt incapable of rendering what he saw. The contour lines had cracked open.

For young Giacometti, the collapse of what he thought he knew marked the beginning of an artistic career defined by astonishment. The visible world ceased to be a pretext for him to exercise his mastery and increasingly became a great mystery that eluded his understanding. In interviews, the complexity of the visible world is a source of frustration to Giacometti, who would bemoan his failure to render a head or a figure as it literally appeared to him. Yet his expressions of failure are tempered by an equal dose of hope, provided by the adventure of observing human beings, whose visible existence he never ceased to marvel at.

My own astonishment at Giacometti’s sculptures and paintings was renewed at his retrospective at the Guggenheim, curated by Megan Fontanella and Catherine Grenier, on view through September 12. Winding up the museum rotunda are seemingly endless variations on what would become, after around 1940, his mature themes. There are portraits of wide-eyed figures, their upper bodies foregrounded by swaths of gray in front of skeletal rooms. There are sculptures of walking men and standing women reduced to symbols of themselves, their figures shrouded in emptiness. The gazes in many of these sculptures, each two steadfast eyes looking at the the viewer, is still present as it was in the early self-portrait. But the figures themselves appear less substantive. As in his mature drawings where each stroke gives form to the white of the page, the surface of each figure is reduced in such a way to draw attention to the emptiness that surrounds them. Some of the most delicious moments of the sculptures I found to be at the edges of the jagged bronze or plaster bodies; the light between an arm and a torso like a resistant wax pushing away ink.

By the time Giacometti committed for good to work from life in 1945, France was coming to terms with the loss of life and a shifting national identity in the wake of World War II. The grounds of existence felt unstable. While Giacometti’s mature work is not explicitly a response to the ravages of war, he acknowledged its role in shifting his perception of human beings.

There was, on one hand, the “danger of disappearance.” Some of the earliest figurative sculptures that he created, just after the start of World War II, depict minuscule figures secured to heavy plinths. In one on view at the Guggenheim, titled “City Square,” spindly male figures walk around –  one female figure stands – upon a wide platform which, owing to its width, creates distance between them. Giacometti recounted that during this time the only way he could conceivably portray people as he saw them would be to make them small, as if he was seeing them from afar.

The positive condition of that “danger of disappearance” was, as Giacometti expressed often and with gusto, an expansion of the unknown, which rendered his vision of the reality all the more astonishing. Speaking to Parinaud in the 1960s, Giacometti recounted: “Before the war, I had the impression that things were stable. Today, not at all. The world amazes me more and more each day.”

This amazement is reflected with particular force in the wide-eyed looks of his portrait busts of and paintings – of his frequent sitters, his brother Diego and his partner Annette, as well as the numerous friends, lovers, and academics who could spare several days of being exhaustively observed in his studio off the Boulevard Montparnasse. A 1953 oil portrait of Diego at the exhibition portrays a seated man of dark gray color in front of a network of black lines delineating the space of a room. His figure brought forward by an aura of lighter charcoal scribbles around him.  The volume of his chest, head and hands is denoted by glints of white. Vertical movements—in the length of his head, a central line between his clasped hands, and elongated tic marks for eyes, ground him in place. Diego’s form pulsates with the activity of intersecting lines, yet he appears very still. What “danger of disappearance” is suggested by Giacometti’s hollow rendering of the room behind Diego is abated by his arresting stare. That stare seems to mirror Giacometti’s own.

In Giacometti’s variations on “Standing Woman” the gaze appears as solid and fixed as the triangular weights for feet that secure them to the earth. Analogously to the seclusion of the sitters in Giacometti’s portraits, “Standing Woman” appears devoid of a context except that of the expanse of empty space evoked in proportion to the narrow figure.

The isolation of the figure in space is just one of the ways in which Giacometti’s nearly ten-year experiments in surrealist sculpture reverberate in his later work. Rewind to 1930, and Giacometti was working in the same studio on the Boulevard Montparnasse. Still perhaps reeling from that episode with the bust, he was convinced of the impossibility of rendering appearances. Instead, he committed himself to producing objects which, he said, “appeared to my mind in a finished state.” The goal was minimal interference of the structure as it had first appeared as a mental image, and so Giacometti avoided any trace of his own hand in each piece’s construction. Andre Breton introduced himself to Giacometti after noticing “Suspended Ball” in an exhibition in 1930, thus inviting him, if for a brief period, into his Surrealist tribe.

On view at the Guggenheim, “Suspended Ball,” consists of a marble ball that hangs from a cubic iron frame above a crescent-moon shaped sliver which is seated on a slightly elevated plane. At the base of the ball is a slit into which the crescent shape just barely grazes from the 45-degree angle at which it rests.  Ambiguously sexual, the shapes appear frozen in a continuum of movement, hovering in a state of impotent potential.

In reference to Breton, Rosalind Krauss defined the surreal as a projection in real space that is “like a waking dream – a fragment of real space altered, because it is created by the desire of the dreamer” yet, she continues, “appears to him simultaneously as something independent of his own will, something he merely happened upon by chance.” It’s an appropriate description of “Suspended Ball” which consists of actual objects in real space arrested in space according to some unnamable, unconscious desire.

The correspondence of Krauss’s description to Giacometti’s later, figurative work is also revealing. Giacometti’s portraits and figures are the products of vision, not mental projection, yet the subjects of his sculptures and paintings were like his surrealist works in as much as they reveal something essential in how they were constructed in his mind. Like a surrealist “fragment of real space altered” Giacometti isolates that which, in his vision of reality, was capable of revealing  forces and patterns that undergird the realm of appearances. Strolling through Paris many years after his surrealist heyday, Giacometti came upon a dog, in whose sullen appearance he saw himself. In his sculpture of the animal – a final treat of the Guggenheim show – it strides like one of the walking men on a flat plinth, alone as if in a dream.

In one of the last self-portrait drawings that he completed, in 1965, Giacometti depicts himself with open eyes and a mouth slightly agape. The straight-angled self-assurance of his youth is long gone. Instead are arched, inward-leaning shoulders which rise into a head. Curved dashes accumulate into darker crevices denoting the volume of a face that stares intently back.

The edges of the figure’s upper body are denoted in faint strokes that open to the light of the page. The top of his head is indicated by gestural touches and his chest is a criss-cross of angled dashes. Giacometti depicts himself as less substantial than he did in the drawing he made at seventeen. Instead, he has given weight to the space that encases his figure. His pencil strokes illuminate the empty whites.

Jean Genet put it well, calling Giacometti’s mature drawings “infinitely precious objects.” He writes, “The strokes are there only to give form and solidity to the whites. Look closely: it is not the stroke which is elegant, it’s the white space contained by it. It is not the stroke which is full, it is the white.”

In a 1963 interview with Andre Parinaud, Giacometti remarked upon the positive condition of his assumed failures to represent appearances. The unknown had expanded, and with it his astonishment at the visible world:

Completed in May 2018 for my MFA Fine Arts Degree. The whole paper is on reserve at the Pratt Institute Library. 

Preface

I spent yesterday in the ceramics studio on the third floor of the Pratt machinery building, working on a hollow sculpture that may well appear in my thesis show. As my shift as a studio monitor was in the morning, I began the day moving delicate greenware into kilns and moving vitrified ceramic objects out of them; guiding the bowls, reclining figures and textured octopi of students to and from their transformation by fire. In the afternoon my hands were immersed in damp, amorphous matter. I drew slits in a slab of stoneware clay, which I then rolled and pinched onto a vessel with side openings like windows of Gaudi building, encasing a tube that extended up through the middle like chimney above an inch or two of space below the base, as if poising it to inhale. I pinched inch and a half long pieces, one at a time, onto a gable partially shielding the hollow bottom, and onto walls that curved around triangular antechambers like cupped wings.              Light bled through windows gauzy with dust. I molded four three-inch legs, and before long the overhead lights were reflecting off the glass against a dark outside. I wrapped the vessel and its legs in plastic to keep them malleable, though the parts had already been stiffened somewhat by the room’s dry heat. Much like ideas, clay only has so long before its moisture evaporates into a form that is fixed and stubborn. Barely removed from the throes of creation, I write about it.

i. The Physical Impression

The “impression,” historically understood as a manifestation of visual sensation, can also be thought of etymologically - as the physical impression of the world upon the body, or, in the case of hands working with clay, as the body upon the world. As art Historian Richard Shiff describes in an essay on the subject, the impression “suggests the contact of one material force or substance with another, resulting in a mark, the trace of the physical interaction that has occurred.”  This form of contact of my embodied mind with my mediums of paint or clay and/or the light of the visible world vis-a-vis the retinas - attached to the body inasmuch as the brain - is my basis for understanding the relationship of my practice of painting to that of ceramic sculpture. In the past two years I have also devoted a significant amount of time to exploring hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, but this paper will exclude the study of time-based works to focus on those which have a more directly physical relationship to this concept of the impression at the core of my practice. Paint and clay, both wet-to-dry mediums that decrease in malleability through the course of creation, speak to the temporal contingency of perception and sensation - the fact that moments of fresh awareness happen in a flash; fragile like a shaft of light on a tree branch, shifting as the instant is grasped.  

I will consider my work primarily in light of what I regard as the primacy of the sense of touch - the “unconscious of vision” as phrased by Finnish architect Julien Palasmaa in Eyes of the Skin.  Living in a world in which my connection with reality is compromised by my cerebral, disembodied interactions with a computer and smartphone, I approach painting and sculpture out of a need to relinquish contact with my body in the world. This is more than cathartic or therapeutic — this need lends itself to an aesthetic strategy. By negotiating what I am seeing through my very bodily, subjective sense of touch, I acknowledge the physical conditions of my knowledge of and being in the world. As JM Bernstein observes, “all authentic meaning must acknowledge its material conditions of possibility.”  

Written for an MFA Symposium Class at the Pratt Institute, April 2017

While perusing Hyun Jung Ahn’s Pratt thesis show, “What I Wanted to Say,”  I had the privilege of overhearing the commentary of a four-year-old, who was looking with his parents at a series of 39 abstract drawings in pencil and pastel on note-size paper titled, together, “I am hiding behind it.”

What is this one, Joshua? the mother asked.   “This one looks like a lion with its head cut off,” he replied. “And these spikeys are its teeth.” “This one is like a whale tale.” “This one is an exclamation point with three legs.”  

At some point during the child’s commentary, Clement Greenberg entered. How he made it here to the Pratt Dekalb Gallery from the mid-century Manhattan art scene is beyond me, but a certain cool, critical gaze and a scalp as smooth as an art deco sphere let there be no question as to who he was. The chief proponent of formalism, great champion of painting’s flatness, was standing in front of a pair of Jung Ahn’s canvas paintings, muttering to himself.

He was smiling, of course. The paintings on which he gazed were composed of angled, flat, planes of black and red, which opened to swaths of untreated beige canvas. In the lefthand composition, a valley between asymmetrical red triangles was punctuated by an angular black stripe which could evoke a shadow or a recession in space, but only by implication. What was striking, he remarked under his breath, was the attitudes these paintings achieved by way of a few precisely arranged planes of color. Imminent space, pure painting, yes, no reference to anything but their material constituency, the reality of the medium, yes.…

A shrill voice broke his reverie: “This one is an elephant!”

The critic turned. He laid a heavy gaze on the child, and then upon the mother and father, who were encouraging the projection of such fantasies.

Greenberg exited the gallery in a puff of smoke, without having read a single title. Neither did the kid, although his guesses weren’t so off the mark. Ahn didn’t name one composition after a circus animal, but that her drawings and paintings compel identification is part of their power. Razor-sharp swaths of thinly applied paint across the four-cornered surface: this might be enough for a twentieth century formalist turned on by and tuned into painting’s flatness. But it is in their relation to states of being, memories and emotions, wherein, if you ask my twenty-first century eyes, Ahn’s drawings and paintings are their most interesting.

The assemblage of wall drawings is a case in point. “Annoyance” “I hate me” “bad habits”  and “spring window” name drawings of a gray square, a timid circle, a off-kilter half-black stick and a blue rectangle respectively. In pastel on paper, these little works read as diaristic but not sentimental. Their anthropomorphic quality owes something to the humble materials, something to the quiver of the hand, and something to their placement, portrait-like, in the center of the page. In small handwriting on the bottom left of the papers, the titles infuse the formal gestures with associations, sometimes to humorous effect. Take “babies” which describes a grouping of bright little blue, yellow, and red shapes. These eager, inchoate beings may just as well remind one of a tribe of little humans in a playpen than as a pack of baby lions at the zoo.  

The wall paintings are also titled with associations like “Night Air,” but their impact lies less in their figuration of experiences than in their spatial geometry. With edges that appear to have been measured by a ruler and not by the precarious human eye, they read less like metaphors and more like facts. But where the drawings are suggestive of interior, human depths, the paintings stand out in another way - in real space. Intersections of color at their centers invoke a tension between the limited frame of the canvas and the walls on which they rest; leading the eye alternately inward and then back out to the white-walled, windowed gallery.

It doesn’t always happen in exhibitions, and certainly not in thesis shows, that every piece exists in dialogue with the others, both in their placement to the gallery and in their relationship to the motif of consideration. No piece was loose in Ahn’s show; it asked that nothing be added or omitted. But to the question, inferred by the title “What I Wanted to Say,” of what is said, and the motives and necessity of speaking, the drawings, more than the paintings or sculptures, seemed to be the most earnest answers. I can’t imagine the addition of another wall of 3 by 13 shapes on paper, yet one wishes there were more of them.  

Sometime after Mr. Greenberg and the child had left the gallery, Ahn caught me looking at a journal of drawings mounted on a platform to the side of “I am hiding behind it.” She directed me to one in particular, a small square with rounded edges filled in with a sfumato of pale gray and blue, the colors of morning mist. The title is a poem written in her native Korean, which she distilled to the question: “How do you contain mind?”

Published March 2016 in Boston Arts Magazine Big Red and Shiny

The subjects of “Congregation,” the centerpiece in an exhibition of still-life paintings by Joseph Ablow at the Boston University Stone Gallery, are tables which resemble planets. Eons away from the dining room, they appear poised within a sparkling cosmic abyss in a moment of gravitational alignment. Oranges emanate from their legs as if from within the prisms of their angular, wooden souls. Lacking faces, they gesture through reverberations of color and expressive distortions of space.

Throughout the collection of iridescent canvases, which the late BU visual art professor completed in the last three decades of his life ending in 2006, we see variations on these tables’ otherworldly communion. We see more tables—as well as cups, pitchers, bowls and the occasional napkin or wrench—animated with the intimacy and loneliness, the attraction and repulsion, of the human beings who are absent from their world. In one painting, a piece of cloth poses as a hat; in another, like a ghostly messenger. Bowls seem to gaze at each other from across great impasses with apparent recognition. A tribe of mugs stand in solidarity against a precariously tilted surface plane.

“What was to have been for me a subject only for study became an engulfing involvement with a world that, for all its stillness, was elusive, mysterious and open,” said Ablow, who transitioned to painting still-lifes after an early career in portraits and figures. Rather than arrange his subjects before painting them, he preferred to approach them as landmarks on a landscape to discover, in all their natural disarray. He wouldn’t start painting his cups, bowls, pitchers or tables, he said, “until they seem to exist without my interference.”

The ubiquity of these tables in Ablow's work owes to his approach to them as world-stages - evoking the vastness of a landscape or the austerity of planets, depending on their distance from the viewer. “Congregation" offers a view of the latter. The tables are depicted within contradictory planes in space so that they appear at once light years away from each other and in close proximity. The white cloth floats in the well of its own dense shadow as if the folds of its flesh were of the fabric of space and time.

There is an inherent aloneness effected by the contradictory dimensions of these objects, no mater how close they sit on the plane of the canvas. But Ablow weighs their formal isolation with an agile use of vibrant colors, deep black shadows and shimmering ethereal brights which bring them into a dramatic dialogue. In "Congregation" veils of iridescent color resolve the divisions of their being, breathing them into a shared presence that transcends their disparate dimensions.  In “Still Life with Kilim,”  color is likewise used to enact a narrative. The dark blue pattern of a Turkish table rug at once adds structure to the visual landscape and also, by virtue of the vertical rigidity of its blocks of dark blue, seemingly insurmountable divisions to the characters who inhabit it. Between the lands of bright orange and pepto-pink, a blue plate waits to cross, between two edges, perhaps forever. A glint of orange to his right prefigures his first move. Meanwhile, his ceramic comrades watch the impasse in solidarity on a red earth that wraps the orange-pink island, marking a territory that the blue plate seems destined never to meet.

Characteristically Modernist, at some moments the objects of Ablow's study nearly dissolve into flattened planes of color. But within his compositions' immediate abstractness operates a dramatic logic characteristic of early painters of narrative - most notably those early Italian Renaissance portraitists who Ablow cited as influences.

Published September 2014 in Atwood Magazine.

It’s hot and crowded on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, but through the lens of your iphone screen, the sun and tourists are just players in your photographic imitation of grandeur. Your boyfriend - let’s call him Billy – wanders off toward the Grand Canal but you remain still amid the shuffle, poised to grab a slice of the visual feast. A bird catches flight. You snap the photo, put a filter on it, and think how pretty your lives are.

But before you can send it to Instagram your moment of beauty dissolves into cliché: between you and the Basilica, a herd of tourists hold up their smartphones. They snap at the birds, they snap at the buildings and with their faces planted to their screens, they silently populate the interweb with a stream of filtered photos no more or less special than yours.

To see one's romanticized digital memories as one tiny sliver among the multitudes may be our tech-saturated age's most ubiquitous form of degradation. Yet there might be comfort in the knowledge that we’re not the first in history to divert our attention from the present moment to the encapsulated, digestible beauty of the Picturesque. That filtered and vignetted instagram photo, if remarkably contemporary, is an expression of an enduring desire to frame the visual world with the goal of making it pleasant to look at. It’s an expression of a desire to capture experience, affecting as it is elusive, into a vision that’s worthy of our idealism.

Long before we applied filters to our moments there was the Claude Glass. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the pocket-size mirror rose to popularity its ability to imitate the glow and gradation of a Baroque-era painting. Its darkened glass lowered the color key of a given land or street ‘scape, accentuating prominent features and playing down specifics while its rounded and convex form would create a vignette. In the time it takes today to snap a photo of a sun-lit canal, yesterday’s romantics could transport the “mellow tinge” of French painter Claude Lorraine’s sun-swept and utterly self-contained masterpieces to a city or pastureland of their own.

That is, if they were willing to turn away from it. To see the glass’s Picturesque vision of the visual world tourists would have to look at a scene from behind, favoring the view through the dark little mirror to the real thing. For the draftsmen among them, the glass facilitated the creation of quick, idyllic sketches to show to friends and family upon return. The mode of recording was slower, even more contemplative, but the motive to record is all too familiar. With a Claude Glass in pocket, the tourist of yesteryear saw life with a visual appetite akin to the iPhone clad of 2014: that is, ready to embellish at the faintest glint of beauty and ready to dismiss the real thing in order to do so.

There may be something exploitative about the pre-framed made-to-order vision of the Claude Glass or, in any case, the iPhone 5, but the desire to capture idyllic versions of our lives is a romantic one at heart. Encapsulated in Claude Lorrain’s epic, classically precise harbor and pastoral scenes is a familiar longing for an all-encompassing beauty beyond the passing moment. Though his style so sought after by owners of his namesake glass may be out of vogue, our modern-day iteration – the tinted squares of Instagram – represents a similar idealism. Like Lorrain’s landscapes, they show us a world that glows with feeling, that’s more elegant than mundane, that expands into the distance, and where the stench and heat are subsumed by the pure golden and blue colors of perfect weather. By crop and by filter, our photos show us what we’ve seen and done with a nostalgia that the unphotographed life evades – a nostalgia for what may or may not have actually been.

Published Summer 2013 on Nowheremag.com. This was part of a series called Nowhereland, of short-form narrative articles I wrote for the website about airport stories.

For eighteen years, Mehran Katrimi Nasseri, who called himself Sir Alfred Mehran, occupied his corner of Terminal One in Charles de Gaulle Airport with a Zen-like resignation to the quiet trappings of routine. It’s been said that if he wasn’t reading from books on politics, he could be seen sitting, staring, on his red bench between a mound of cargo boxes, his mustache impeccably trimmed and his gaze steadied beneath a heavy brow, watching travelers rush to and from their final destinations.

Evidence says Mehran could have left the Paris airport if he wanted to. Several years after he arrived in 1988, a prominent Parisian lawyer argued his case, ultimately awarding him identity documents and the right to travel. But then Mehran refused to leave, although it’s unclear why. Confusing as the bureaucracy of his situation was, evidence points to the fact that Mehran was also becoming more and more comfortable with this life in nowhereland, where he was free to spend his days as he pleased. He accepted meals and occasionally money in exchange for his tale—an increasingly tangled tapestry of details from his past that he was known to string together through the narratives of reporters who’d written about him (he kept the articles in his cargo boxes). By the time Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal was released some sixteen years later, his life in the airport had become more than an identity. His predicament was also his fame.

Mehran’s journey to the red airport bench began around 1972 after the death of his physician father, when it was revealed to him that he was the illegitimate child of a Scottish nurse. Chastised by his family, Mehran left home for a university in England where he soon became involved in political protests, an endeavor that ultimately saw him banned from returning to his home country.

Published Summer 2013 on Nowheremag.com

The quack of geese echo through the marshland air of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, but they do little to silence the chug of boats and trains across the river in New York City. Look across the water and you can see the skyline of Queens. Look up, and if you don’t see a bird you’re likely to see a plane, taking off from JFK Airport or LaGuardia just a few miles away. Where the city has nature and man divided, in the sky both have free reign. Without paths and borders, birds and man collide – literally – flying into each other at high velocity a few times each year. We’re still not sure who’s winning.

It was in 2004 that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began to exterminate geese from the New York Metro Area in response to bird strikes by aircraft, which had damaged planes at LaGuardia nine times in the five years prior. Although most collisions don’t force emergency landings, they do have the potential to dent fuselages, shatter windshields and ruin engines. In January 2009, just three miles into a New York flight bound for Charlotte, NC, a flock of geese hit the plane and forced Capt. Chesley Sullenberger to land the vessel on the Hudson River. In the year that followed, 1,276 geese were removed from the city.

This story for Nowheremag.com was informed by an episode that would inspire Antoine de Saint-Exupery to write Le Petit Prince. Find his memoir here.

The pilot’s seat can be a lonely place. The desert, something else entirely. At noon the sun burns, boiling the expanse of sand that blows across the dunes and mercilessly into the faces of the two pilots, whose fallen aircraft releases a faint pipe of smoke, dissolving into the heat like a mirage. Their maps are poor and so they wander. No sign of water, no houses on the horizon that would point to civilization. They check their food supply. Two oranges, some grapes, a thermos of coffee, a handful of crackers, chocolate, a small portion of wine and a day’s ration of water. It occurs to them they may never leave. The nights are cold in the Sahara Desert.

The two pilots, Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Andre Prevot, had crashed en route to Saigon from Paris in an attempt to break the speed record for a prize of 15,000 Francs. That morning had found Saint-Exupery at the control panel navigating through clouds above cities, jungles and mountains from the first glint of dawn on December 30, 1935. Saint-Exupery delights in the freedom of life above the earth.

His joie de vivre does not escape him when he meets the desert ground, but its purpose intensifies by the hour. The golden expanse offers little consolation to he and Prevot, and so he looks inward for solace. “I was no more than a mortal strayed between the sand and stars, conscious of the single blessing of breathing. And yet I discovered myself full of dreams,” Saint-Exupery would later reflect in his memoir, Wind, Sand, and Stars. The physical world soon tightens its grip, however. Days of dehydration find Prevot and Saint-Exupery seized by nausea and hallucinations. One day, Saint-Exupery has a vision of a little prince who has come to earth from his little planet far away.

Nearing death, Saint-Exupery and Prevot see the silhouette of a figure on horseback in the distance. The figure is a Bedouin man, from Libya, and his face glows with humanity. He has come to rescue them.

“All my friends and all my enemies marched towards me in your person,” Saint-Exupery recalls. “It did not seem to me that you were rescuing me: rather did it seem that you were forgiving me. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world.”