Painting in the Anthropocene Barry Schwabsky John Newsom is swimming against the tide. And when you swim against a tide, you can’t afford to take feeble strokes or waste your energy—and you certainly can’t afford to relax. You’ve got to pull as hard as you can. And that’s kind of ironic because the tide that Newsom is swimming against is the tide of voices telling painters not to try so hard—voices that say, more or less, “Well, ok, we recognize that painting isn’t quite dead (regrettable as that may be), but you have to admit that it’s looking pretty peaked, pretty weak, pretty faded. Its viability is at least questionable. And so wouldn’t the best thing for it be to just take it easy for a while, get some well­deserved rest, and not strain itself trying to do too much?” Sometimes this pessimistic diagnosis takes on a more or less implicit sociopolitical overtone; the idea would be something to the effect that painting’s present debility is a consequence of its history as the province of dead white European males, not to mention its connection by what Clement Greenberg once called an umbilical cord of gold to the protection of the ruling class and the vices of wealth and power. In this variation on the theme, painting should take on a recessive character as a kind of penance: It has an ethical responsibility to make itself look weak, fragile, and not too overtly ambitious. Another iteration of this theme, the most cogent one, puts the emphasis more on purely stylistic considerations. It’s a way of pursuing into the present the Modernist emphasis on the unfinished, which split Manet from his pompier contemporaries; Raphael Rubinstein has drawn attention to the proliferation, in recent years, of “works that look casual, dashed­off, tentative, unfinished or self­cancelling” and that “deliberately turn away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk 1
inconsequence or collapse.” In this situation, it takes strength to pursue “strong painting”—whatever that turns out to be. But that’s what Newsom is doing. And for a contemporary viewer it takes some getting used to. Me included. After all, I admire many of the same painters Rubinstein does. I love Mary Heilmann; I love Raoul De Keyser, whose paintings approach (as I once put it) “the edge of 2
emptiness, of awkwardness, of a sort of visual inaudibility.” But I also recognize the risk of turning a given painter’s stylistic repertoire—which is the right one for him—into a kind of criterion for contemporaneity, of believing or seeming to imply that this particular way of working is “what the age demanded,” in Ezra Pound’s scornful phrase. And I am much less sanguine about some of Rubinstein’s other choices; Michael Krebber, for instance, seems to me to be all too successful in his efforts, as John Kelsey explicates them, to avoid any gesture whose aim would be “to fulfill any particular end, to succeed in accomplishing some ultimate 3
significance or work.” An age that lacks the tools to distinguish Krebber’s slacker dandyism from De Keyser’s 4
“impetuosity and strangeness” (Adrian Searle), which is the product of a profound intransigence, is all the less likely to cozy up to an artist who forthrightly declares, “I will not accept lazy painting,” and who says that when he looks at exhibitions, “I want the full meal. I 1
Raphael Rubinstein, “Provisional Painting,” Art in America (May 2009), p. 123,
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/provisional-painting-raphael-rubinstein/ .
2
Barry Schwabsky, “Raoul De Keyser,” Artforum, June 2004, p. 240, https://artforum.com/inprint/
issue=200406&id=6949.
3
John Kelsey, “Stop Painting Painting,” Artforum, October 2005, p. 225, https://artforum.com/inprint/
issue=200508&id=44286.
4
Searle, Adrian. “Raoul De Keyser,” Unbound: Possibilities in Painting (London: Hayward Gallery, 1994), p. tk,
http://16fdn9ufhox41fwkc1azw8b1bio.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/RDK-Unbound-Hay
ward-Gallery-Searle-1994.pdf.
want to walk in there and have a rich experience, I want it to be generous,” in the sense that it 5
provides “a complete formal gestalt.” Of course, this begs the question: How complete must it be to count as complete? Or, conversely, can’t it become too complete, overdone, overworked, bombastic? Newsom’s paintings walk this line. What helps keep “the full meal” from turning into La Grand Bouffe, I think—what keeps “strong painting” from becoming merely musclebound—is Newsom’s secret weapon: the discipline that comes from his considering himself, not a painter of images, but rather an abstractionist. If you talk to Newsom about painting—and I recommend it; the conversation will be as animated as it is informative—you’ll notice that while his appetite for painting embraces the whole history of western art and beyond, most of his main reference points when it comes to the twentieth century belong to abstraction: Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, Brice Marden and Terry Winters are some of the names that recur; Kasimir Malevich, too, a lot. And not only that: When Newsom talks about his own work, he tends to put the emphasis squarely on its structure rather than its iconography. In other words, and like it or not, he is intent on making “modernist painting” in very much the sense that Clement Greenberg understood it when he wrote his famous 1960 essay of that title, modernists being those of whom it can be said, “One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first.” But if so, then it must be admitted that Newsom is a tricky sort of modernist, because his paintings may seem to foreground their imagery—what is in the picture, in Greenberg’s sense. But do this, not in reaction against modernism, but precisely on the assumption (a hazardous 5
“Painting Time: Ross Bleckner interviews John Newsom,” in John Newsom: Allegories of Naturalism (Milan: Edizioni
Charta, 2010), p. 16.
assumption today, as Newsom well knows) that the modernist lesson has already been learned and internalized and that the viewer assumes that (as Greenberg immediately continues) “This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism 6
imposes it as the only and necessary way.” I can only wonder what Greenberg would have made of Newsom’s paintings. Certainly, at least at first glance, Newsom evinces no interest in pursuing what Greenberg called opticality, or more specifically “purely optical experience as against optical experience modified or revised 7
by tactile associations.” His surfaces are in fact richly tactile. To appreciate his paintings is inevitably to engage with their surfaces, and not only as fields of purely sensual incident but as implicit records of the activity of making the painting. That is, to enjoy the paintings involves to some extent putting oneself in the place of the painter and seeing or in any case at least speculating about—through the clues embedded in the surface—how the painting came into being, the stages of its genesis. It is to discover an abstract temporality in operation and to discern its syntax. But this is hardly to say that optical experience is irrelevant to Newsom’s art. It is only to assert—contra Greenberg—that the senses never act in isolation and that optical experience is never unmodified or unrevised by the haptic. Greenberg should have known this, and had he reflected differently on his early enthusiasm for Dubuffet and Pollock, he might have remembered how the opticality of their paintings arose precisely as a kind of emanation of its material texture. The same is true in Newsom’s case. The impasto that he so often uses is not about the conspicuous consumption of materials. In fact it has a paradoxical effect. On the one 6
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4, Modernism with a
Vengeance, 1957-1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 87.
7
Greenberg, p. 89.
hand it calls attention to the materiality of paint, to the fact that what one is seeing is more than just an evanescent image formed by liquid crystals in a monitor or something printed in ink on a page in a magazine; a painted image has body and the relief of impasto re­marks that body. It can actually deemphasize the image as such, submerging it in matter. But on the other hand, especially when a multitude of colors is used, their interlacing not only across the plane of the painting but also at different levels of distance from the surface creates a kind of optical dazzle that seems to float intangibly in front of it. In other words, the profusion of material stimuli creates an immaterial shimmer in which the eye becomes pleasurably entangled, not unlike that in certain Impressionist and Pointillist painting or in the densely woven drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. This shimmer helps fuse that otherwise might be clashing formal and imagistic components of the painting into a totality. I understand that some viewers may be surprised that I see Newsom’s paintings in primarily abstract terms, and that I lay emphasis on the way his very use of paint downplays his work’s imagistic content. Yes, his paintings are full of imagery, and it is consistently taken from a very specific and consistent repertoire: depictions of nature, of flora and fauna. In his recent paintings the protagonists are wolves and tigers, butterflies and lizards; there are owls and parrots and all manner of avian life. Nor is the botanical realm absent, though perhaps shown less profusely than in earlier work. No wonder the 2010 monograph on Newsom’s work was subtitled “Allegories of Naturalism.” And not without reason. But his works could just as accurately be called “Allegories of Painting” instead. A good example, though I could pick many others, would be the one called Rogue Arena. In its very title I hear an echo of the familiar words from Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters”: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, 8
re­design, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.” But this arena is a rogue—not exactly what Rosenberg envisioned back in 1952: not a place where the painter fights it out with the blank canvas with no preliminaries and nothing to go on but nerve. Rosenberg named no names in his essay, and many have wondered who he had in mind as the prototypical “action painter.” Often, it’s Willem de Kooning who’s seen as best fitting the description, but for others, Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock at work have seemed the likely model for Rosenberg’s agonistic protagonist. If I am right that Newsom intended the echo of Rosenberg’s description of abstract expressionist painting, then he must be among those who accept Pollock as Rosenberg’s primary referent, because in Rogue Arena—which, like many of Newsom’s works, can be analyzed as a construction in three planes—what functions as the “ground” for the images is a network of spots and splattered paint that overtly echoes Pollock’s famous pours and drips. The middle ground is occupied by number of floating monochromatic triangles, while in the foreground—as the ostensible subject of the painting—is a tiger that is turning its head to gaze out coolly at the viewer. So the painting encompasses two genres of abstraction—gestural and geometric—along with a representational image. But in a different sense the representation is also a kind of abstraction, in that it highlights a sense of distance from what it pictures. It’s not so much a representation of a tiger as it is a representation of an image of a tiger. And there are two reasons for that. One has to do with scale: This tiger’s head alone must be about eight feet high. So as 8
Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p.
25.
with, for instance, some of Alex Katz’s portraits, the change in size effects a transformation of the viewer’s reading—with Katz one sees the form before the referent; with Newsom, one sees texture and pattern first. As Newsom himself has said of what scale does to his imagery, “It’s a 9
painterly abstraction.” The second reason that Newsom’s image is abstracted from what it seems to picture is that it seems to refer, not directly or transparently to a tiger, but rather to other pictures of tigers that we have seen in other contexts, from illustrations in encyclopedias and books on the natural world to black velvet paintings. In other words, the image refers to the natural world only through the received images and stereotypes we already have of it. To the extent that the painting can be interpreted as an “allegory of naturalism,” it argues that our relation to the natural is broken insofar as it is merely schematic, mediated by an artifice; as Walter Benjamin wrote of Baroque allegory, it is “not convention of expression, but expression 10
of convention.” The minatory face of the tiger is really one’s own, in the distorting mirror of our image of nature. As an allegory of painting, however, Rogue Arena functions differently. Its subject is phenomenological: surface and depth, space and image. What counts in this view is not so much what the tiger “represents” as the fact that we can perceive it, not so much as a figure imposed upon a ground, but rather as a kind of concentrate or emanation of the ground. Although the tiger is literally painted on top of the ground—differently from some of Newsom’s other paintings, in which the background is painted around the form that has been reserved for the animal “portrait”—figure and ground are unified through their coloristic correspondences; the mottled patterns of the ground are like an out­of­focus version of the tiger’s coat or, vice versa, the 9
“Painting Time,” p. 14.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. by John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 175.
10
tiger’s pelt might be a more precisely delineated version of what we glimpse in its background. Instead, the geometry that at first seemed to occupy the middle ground—two of the five triangles are intersected by the tiger, so that it appears to be in front of them—becomes the most prominent element, and this is underlined by the fast that a thicker impasto has been added to the colored triangles in the final stage of the painting’s construction. As a painting about nature, Rogue Arena has a pessimistic message to convey to us—which should hardly be surprising to anyone who’s read the news about climate change or encountered the idea that we have entered a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, in which humans are transforming their environment in ways that they can’t actually control. As a painting about painting, however, its message is more encouraging. It suggests that our misperceptions can become an essential part of our visual exploration and comprehension of the world, that vision and cognition can form a virtuous circle, but only when we let the two faculties inform each other and make good on the other’s limitations. This may seem cold comfort in light of the bad news about our changing relation to the deteriorating natural world. But if we knew how to extend to a larger arena the humility and resourcefulness the painting’s message enjoins on us, we still might be able to escape the worst. It’s hard to be swimming against a tide of our own making. We should be grateful to have art to lift our spirits.