Group 11: Works On Paper 1994 -1997 : The Cave

As a teenager I remember being taught that making art was a journey, a life-long ramble through all visualizations and there was no telling where one might go. One moves through things, though ideas, styles, and techniques and, through ambitions, aspirations and you never really know what is just around the corner. That is what is so interesting about art, it’s not all that controllable. You go along working in some mode based on ideas you have formulated or agreed to and you look around and there are other ways too. So there are always other choices, but even when you ignore them or feel you can’t agree with a certain premise, well sometimes that’s just too bad, they might get under your skin anyway.

In my case, Neo-Expressionism was becoming prominent during my formative years, from the late ‘70s onward. Then, I was interested in minimalist philosophy, in art that was reduced to basic elements and processes. I went into that because I wanted to understand the foundational language of art. I wanted to understand the elemental. But I kept looking over my shoulder so to speak at other movements. It was a kind of quiet semi conscious dialog that was transpiring somewhere within. As I pursued an understanding of my interests, my definition of what was essential to art broadened over time. Then, it seemed that all of a sudden (though it had taken me decades) I had arrived at a place where the idea of dealing with images and playing with my responses to them, was the most appropriate thing in the world to do. This was the model I had been quietly watching out of the corner of my eye for years, in artists like Basquiat, Keifer, Clemente and other Neo Expressionists.

Expressionism is very complicated stuff; the artist’s relation to the self and to his or her subjects. Artist Jean Dubuffet brilliantly analyses its particular phenomenon in his book Initiatory Paintings of Alfonso Ossorio. Dubuffet talks about the conflicting goals that can exist within the artist. While one is trying to express something about the subject one has chosen, often embodied in the process of depicting an image, one alternatively desires to express one’s own identity. Perhaps this internal push and pull accounts for why images in early expressionism frequently morph into brushwork and visa versa. Gesture, it could be said, is the visual equivalent of the artist’s voice, which wants to be heard sometimes above the content of the subject. Dubuffet, Ossorio, de Kooning, the figurative works by Pollock in ’51 and Guston’s return to the figure all foreshadowed the work of the later Neo Expressionists, but the difference was that the earlier artists where also gauging their works by formal concerns, which is a modernist mode. The latter group abandoned formalism and let autobiography rule, which explains the sort of let loose feeling in a lot of the later work and probably the use of words. The words seemed to function to bring attention back to the artist’s voice. My work in the Neo Expressionist mode seems to lay in between somewhere, as I have deep roots in the earlier period but age wise, am a person of the latter one.

The work from ‘94 – ‘97 represents that part of my life where there was that switching between the subject and the self, indicated either through gestures or the use of symbols or words. I think of this point on the path as the “cave” (of Neo Expressionism) because it felt like I had arrived to a kind of isolated, protected space, in which I could project the emotion of the ambiguity or irony that existed in my relation things. Many artists in America and in Europe had been working in this space for a few decades. It was, in a sense, a generational location, as if the whole lot had been corralled into that isolated space, which was at the same time was being observed by culture. It was like being animals in the zoo. “Look kids, there’s an artist over there, grinding his chocolate!” (We weren’t Fauves anymore, we, had been captured.) Overindulgence in our needs had been the hunger that enabled culture to get us. Like no other generation before, we wanted attention, money, fame, etc; to live and to work as artists and some of us could be almost belligerent about it. We could scratch ourselves, throw excrement at the audience, do pretty much anything because we were protected by that emerging celebrity of “artist” thing that fit so well with the expressionist identity. And it was identity that was the real subject of the day, the outcome of the post modernist rational, the supposed supremacy of the subjective self.

If you detect some negativity about this, it is because I do have a problem with some of it. I have overcome the idea of a completely subjective universe, but to discuss all that requires more than can be written here. Nevertheless, there is still something valuable about Neo Expressionism, and so I am trying not to throw the baby out with the bath water. To be brief, Neo-Expressionism, if instigated by the humility that could come from our existential vulnerability (and not from overindulgence in self-importance) is still a very powerful and valid voice in art as far as I am concerned. It is something that has to be parsed.

About some works:

Deer John was a joke between John Chamberlain and me about notes. The classic “Dear John” is of course that letter written during war to a soldier by the gal he’s left at home. It’s that fateful message telling him she’s found another man, while he’s out there on the battlefield getting shot at. The other inspiration for the work, was Chamberlain’s note to an artist friend, which read something like, “dear______ here’s the note I told you I left you.”

In some other works, I used OSHA danger signs as images, like in Schlumberger (a nod to the de Menils), which is written at the bottom of a hazardous material sign in melted clay, and Gold Only, and Corro. Another group as made with flocking powder. Flocked Chair, Footstool and the Yves Kline inspired Flocked Venus ( my wife’s body print) were all done by applying a glue-like medium to the paper and covering it with flocking material. Then there were the “melts” where images were painted in wax on a wax background and then melted with a heat gun or torch; Leaf and Dissolvers and the Pitch series (in which images of pop up tents were used.) There are two works which are eulogistic, Freye (Hansel) and J. Brooks; both great friends and artists who had died during this period. Freye was one of the best artists I have known. Her Neo Expressionist paintings should really be re-evaluated, they are amazing and even prescient. Her performance and installation pieces were marvelously witty and ahead of their time. Her untimely death made worse by the long descent to it, was one of the saddest things, I had known. Alzheimer’s brought Jim Brooks down but he’d lived a long, productive and wonderful life. Both of them are very under-rated but I am sure that will change over time. In the pieces dedicated to these friends, I imitated their works, as a way of honoring them.

Lastly there is a series done at the end of the period called Rialto. These works explore the idea of the bridge over something and this was the beginning of my exploration into using separate physical layers. The backgrounds were watercolors on paper where all the color came from, the foreground, depictions of the Rialto in Venice taken from paintings by W.J.M. Turner done in black (and sometimes white) on translucent velum. The images of the bridge were put over the watercolor layer. The bridge of course was a literary symbol of the physical process.

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