Wild Ducks Flying Backward (16 page)

And now here they are, those righteous authorities, all terse and businesslike, scarcely granting me time to wipe my greasy mouth with my sleeve before ushering me out of the cell and down the piss-green corridor to that clean, well-lighted place where I’m to be legally murdered by the state.

Despite having once again enjoyed, in what are scheduled to be my closing minutes, one of life’s most agreeable pleasures, I will not falsely claim that I am wholly at peace. Even tomato sandwiches have their limitations. They’ve left me satiated but, in my current situation, hardly serene. Yet neither am I defiant. And I’m certainly not resigned.

I’m not resigned because, you see, I have a plan. I’m not resigned because this is
my
fantasy, after all, and provided it is dramatically correct, I must insist on a happy ending.

Whoa! What’s this? A tremendous explosion has suddenly ripped through the building, throwing me to the floor like a Dear John letter. As debris sifts down upon us, my escorts and I lie there, they stunned, I looking up frantically through the swirling cumulus of dust until I see in the near distance the beckoning lights of dawn.

Bleeding, soiled, lame, I hop through the rubble on one leg, like a flamingo in a sack race. With surprising speed, I’m out into the exercise yard. The guard tower has toppled and in the prison wall there’s a hole so wide you could fit an hour’s worth of corporate greed in it and have room left over for all of Dick Cheney’s draft deferments. Wow! My friends in the Mad Scientists Underground sure know how to orchestrate a jailbreak!

In the deserted street outside the prison walls, Naomi Watts waits in a black Ferrari, its engine revving like a velvet chainsaw. I get in, give Naomi a kiss, she pops the clutch, and off we rocket, barreling down to Mexico at 110 miles an hour. Mexico. Our good neighbor to the south. Mexico, where nowadays sliced bread is widely available, where the lime-flavored mayonnaise is
muy bueno,
and where the tomatoes—if not harvested prematurely or shampooed in pesticide—are
muy
damn
bueno,
indeed.

What Is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?

“Whoever communicates to his brothers in suffering the secret splendor of his dreams acts upon the surrounding society like a solvent, and makes all who understand him, often without their realization, outlaws and rebels.”

—Pierre Quillard

T
he most useful thing about art is its uselessness.

Have I lost you already? Wait a minute. My point is that there’s a place—an important place, as a matter of fact—in our all too pragmatic world for the impractical and the non-essential, and that art occupies that place more gloriously than does just about anything else; occupies it with such authority and with such inspirational if quixotic results that we find ourselves in the contradictory position of having to concede that the non-essential can be very essential, indeed, if for no other reason than that an environment reduced to essentials is a subhuman environment in which only drones will thrive.

Taking it a step further, perhaps, let’s proclaim that art has no greater enemy than those artists who permit their art to become subservient to socio-political issues or ideals. In so doing, they not only violate art’s fundamental sovereignty, they surrender that independence from function that made it art (as opposed to craft or propaganda) in the first place. At the heart of any genuine aesthetic response are sensations that have no rational application, material or psychological, yet somehow manage to enrich our lives.

The notion that art must be an instrument for discernible social betterment is Calvinistic, and the work that is guided by that premise is fundamentally puritanical, even when its content is sexually explicit.

Obviously, art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Like a coral animal, it is embedded in a vast undulating reef of economics, politics, religion, entertainment, and social movements of one kind or another. Yet, while we are in art’s thrall, we’re lifted out of mundane context and granted a temporary visa to a less ordinary dimension, where our existential burden is momentarily lifted and we surf a wave of pure perceptual pleasure. And what is art, after all, but a vehicle for the transportation of perceptual (i.e. aesthetic) values?

This is not to say that a work of art can’t convey other, additional values, values with intellectual and/or emotional heft. However, if it’s really art, then those values will play a secondary role. To be sure, we may praise a piece for its cultural insights, for the progressive statement it makes and the courageous stand it takes, but to honor it as “art” when its aesthetic impact is not its dominant feature is to fall into a philistine trap of shoddy semantics and false emphasis.

Speaking of semantics, let’s pause for an irritating second or two and define our terms. Ask most people what the word “aesthetic” means and they’ll unhesitantly answer, “beauty.” Sorry, friends, it just ain’t so. Beauty is frequently the major generative force in aesthetics, for the artist and his or her audience alike—but beauty isn’t a necessary ingredient in an aesthetic enterprise nor does it by any means define one. In aesthetics, beauty and ugliness are relative terms, and whether a piece is one or the other is often merely a matter of taste.

Like ethics, logic, theology, epistemology, metaphysics, etc., aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, in this case the branch that deals with our powers of sensory perception; more specifically, with how we attempt to understand and evaluate the external phenomena registered by our eyes and ears. When the composition that delights, thrills, captivates, or challenges our sensory receptors has been created for that very purpose, we call it
art
.

Artistic creation is a mysterious venture about which little can be said that isn’t misleading. To attempt to pin down art, to lock it in the airless closet of tight definition is boorish, even totalitarian. Yet unless we have somewhat of a consensus about what art is, unless we can evaluate it within certain aesthetic parameters, however flexible and broad, we cannot claim it as a subject. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it became hip to assert, “Hey, man,
everything
is art.” That convenient notion is as evasive as it is inclusive, for if everything is art, then hey, man,
nothing
is art. If there’s no separate category of human production that can be identified as “art,” then we can no longer discuss art, let alone isolate it in a coherent exhibition or hold it to standards of excellence; art will have become indistinguishable from the manufactured flotsam and jetsam under whose weight the crust of the earth (and likely the collective soul) is slowly cracking, sinking, festering.

Politics, too, is a somewhat nebulous subject. It has been defined as “the art (sic) of compromise,” ignoring the fact that artists historically have been among the least compromising of individuals, or that while most universities offer degrees in political
science,
none to my knowledge teach political
art
.

Personally, I define politics as “the ambition to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them.” Politics, in other words, is an organized, publicly sanctioned amplification of the infantile itch to always have one’s own way.

But let’s not eat off the cynic’s plate. Certainly, ninety percent of the planet’s politicians have a single unwavering goal: to gain power, hold on to it at all costs, and reap the rewards. Yet there is political thought and political action that is altruistic and humanistic, free of narcissism and avarice (temporarily, at least: the truest of all truisms is the one that declares that sooner or later power corrupts). There are political agendas that champion pacifism, civil rights, health care, and environmental preservation, and those agendas merit our support and respect. What they do
not
merit is an uncontested usurpation of our art.

Socio-political statements, however laudable, however crucial, can cause the less sophisticated viewer to overlook the fact that the art delivering those statements is often inept, derivative, and trite. When we accept bad art because it’s good politics, we’re killing the swan to feed the chickens.

Those who would refute my contention that art and politics run on parallel tracks and seldom the twain shall meet inevitably confront me with the example of Picasso’s
Guernica
. There’s no denying that that monumental 1937 masterpiece was a direct result of Picasso’s revulsion at the unprecedented saturation bombing of a civilian village (a common military tactic nowadays, sad to say), or that the painting was intended as an impassioned protest against war in general (war being the all–too–frequent terminus of the political trajectory). However, had Picasso allowed his stirred feelings to override his radical painterly principles, had he produced a traditional, literal, unimaginative rendering of military atrocity instead of this wild, virtuoso outpouring of Cubistic invention, you can bet the ranch dressing that now, 70 years later, museum visitors would not be standing before it in awe.

What moves us finally in
Guernica
are the surprising range of its monochromatic colors, its dynamic lines, disturbing anatomical dislocations, bizarre metamorphoses, shocking fragmentations, and those raw, mysterious symbols that resonate with such potency in our psyches, even though they may never be completely understood by our rational minds.

Guernica
succeeds politically because it first and foremost succeeds aesthetically. The memories it may once have invoked of Spanish fascism have long ago been eclipsed by the explosive, exhilarating force with which it deconstructs form and distributes it about the picture plane. Despite its underpinnings of horror and outrage, it is primarily a visual experience.

Because of the way they say “yes” to life—and thus automatically say “no” to those ideas and actions that threaten life or restrict it—there’s a sense in which Renoir’s rosy nudes, Calder’s dancing amoebas, and Warhol’s deadpan soup cans (to pick just three examples) are as much a condemnation of brutality as Picasso’s
Guernica
. Interpreted as antiwar statements, are they not then political? Seen from that angle, they are. But in the works of Renoir, Calder, and Warhol, even more than in
Guernica,
the political implications are subtle, ambiguous, and, most important, subordinate to the aesthetic. That’s what makes them art.

And art, like love, is what makes the world forever fresh and new. However, this revitalization cannot be said to be art’s purpose. Art revitalizes precisely because it
has
no purpose. Except to engage our senses. The emancipating jounce of inspired uselessness.

Morris Louis: Empty and Full

O
ne of the more pleasant paradoxes of McLuhanization is that a “bush-league” town like Seattle can nurture a sensibility enlightened enough to organize, catalog, and mount a major exhibition of Morris Louis while at the same time—by virtue of the provincialism which persists here in spite of the new global togetherness—can afford an opportunity to view Louis in fresh context.

Sensibly, Seattle’s Contemporary Art Council resisted the impulse to attempt a Louis retrospective. It chose, instead, to restrict itself to two periods—the so-called “veils” and “unfurleds”—of the artist’s career, a decision that was not only realistic but one which permitted a more studied appreciation of the prowess of Louis’s talent than would have a less concentrated sampling of all four of his major periods. For one thing, there is greater stylistic variety within the veil series and the unfurled series than may be found within the paintings known as “florals” or those known as “stripes.” Moreover, the pairing of veils and unfurleds illustrated dramatically the dazzling creative leaps of which Louis was capable—the veils and unfurleds are virtually pictorial
opposites
.

In the veils, airy Niagaras of integrated color configurations flood their large supports from framing-edge to framing-edge; in the unfurleds, individual irregular ribbons of opaque color are stacked at the sides of equally large canvases, leaving in the interiors vast expanses of surface of approximately the same size and shape as the veil image—but
blank
.

Finally, since the specificity of its ambition allowed it to stress quality rather than quantity—of the 22 enormous pictures in the exhibition, at least 15 represent Louis at the summit of his achievement—the council was able to borrow from the Louis estate several important works which never had been displayed before.

Among the previously unexhibited pictures was
Tau,
a significant variant on the unfurled theme.
Tau
can be read as a greatly enlarged detail from one of the banked ribbon configurations of a more typical unfurled. Magnified, the ribbons (or rivulets)—flowing diagonally from framing-edge to framing-edge (and, by implication, indefinitely beyond)—take on an ominousness of shape that is only partly relieved by the resounding brilliance of their colors. In these proportions, the ribbons of consistent color become even more difficult to read as drawing than when of “normal” size; indeed, any relationship with a human creator is nearly impossible for the eye to establish.

Tau,
to my knowledge, is the only picture in which Louis’s romanticism seems more sardonic than benign: the proximity of large individual shapes manufactures a visual field that is oppressive, whereas Louis’s picture planes usually are almost seductively inviting.

Overhang,
another variant, appears to be a transitional painting that successfully bridges the veil and floral periods. The color configurations are more distinct, more tangible than in the usual veil, but they are monadelphous to the extent that they resist establishing planes or Cubistic juxtapositions, a condition that, as Michael Fried has pointed out, created problems in some of the florals.

The Seattle exhibition made possible a consideration of Louis not usually afforded. The Seattle art community is neither ignorant of the perspicuous formal analyses of Louis made by Greenberg and Fried, nor are we naive enough to believe that in modernistic painting content can exist independently of form. We are, however, at sufficient distance from the citadels of formalist criticism that we may—with comfort—allot more than the usual priority to the experiential aspects of Louis’s work. That Louis was a visionary painter is beyond question. But if he ever spoke of the nature of his philosophical predilections, his friends have been notably reticent on the subject. We might, however, consider several ways in which Louis’s work regularly transcends its own materiality—and even its predominant opticality—to provide experiences which can probably best be described as metaphysical.

Along with certain paintings by Pollock, Rothko, Reinhardt, and Robert Irwin, Louis’s veils and unfurleds project an “extraterrestrial” presence as opposed to the “sea-level” character of most art. These descriptions are not as eccentric as they would at first appear.

At sea level, weight and gravity are, for all practical purposes, interchangeable. Likewise, in most painting, weight (a condition of pictorial density usually prescribed by opulence of pigment, fullness of volume, or darkness of value) is also inseparable from gravity (a condition of pictorial force usually prescribed by changes of rhythm, dynamics of contour, or balance of plane—in short, those elements which exert tension upon the picture plane and within the eye of the beholder). In outer space, however, weight and gravity can, and normally do, occur independently of one another.

From a height of 200 miles, the gravity field in which an astronaut is moving still has ninety percent of its terrestrial value, yet his weight is exactly nothing. The undulation of rivulets in the unfurleds and the lucid interchanges of color configurations in the veils exert a relatively profound gravitational force from which the eye of the observer is never free, yet despite Louis’s scale—partly because of it—the atmospheric posture and subtle balance of tensions in these pictures is such that they seem absolutely
weightless
.

Before the veils and unfurleds, the observer experiences the exhilaration man almost always feels when he succeeds in soaring free from the earth—an exhilaration that is particularly sensational but which evokes conditions of consciousness that are essentially spiritual. It is no coincidence that the gods of so many disparate cultures have dwelt in the sky.

Space in the veils and unfurleds embodies an act of manipulation with obvious supra-optic overtones. In the unfurleds, Louis
parted
the veils—he removed the huge continuous image which had obscured, however transparently, the center of his canvases. The space subsequently exposed, although blank, proved surprisingly to be neither dull nor dead. It possessed not only color and shape but a spatial presence at least as strong as that of the veils. Such a phenomenon could be analogous to numerous references in mystic literature to the very real substance of that formlessness which exists when form has gone.

Too, from a certain perspective the unfurleds’ banks of ribbons look to be waves or beams which have been deflected by an area of space of such substance that it is impenetrable. From another perspective the same ribbons seem to be floating like banners in a space that is entirely vaporous.

In either case, a sense of the
void
is conveyed with a reality unequaled in all of art. And, as in most Eastern philosophies, it is a void simultaneously full and empty, nothing and everything.

ARTFORUM,
September 1967