He is merciful...Mohammed Ehsai (Iran - 2007)... seen at The Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia

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The piece is called "He is merciful." Yes, God forgives, but can we ever forgive ourselves?

If we look back on experiences we had and the harmful things we did to others which are truly painful for us to remember, and perhaps if we view this as a stage we left and cannot go back to, we can join God in forgiving ourselves. Then there would be nothing left for us but joy. 

So I think the key to forgiving ourselves is to look at a painful memory and to say, basically, "Thank God I moved away from acting like that. Thank God I can't do that anymore." This can lead to a sense of calmness and can help to remove the sense of lingering regret we might feel. 

What about forgiving others who have hurt us? This seems to be one of the most difficult of goals. Lots of folks talk about the importance of forgiveness, and they claim to have forgiven, but I am not so sure I can believe them.

Maybe we should think about what "forgiveness" would be. It would not involve reclassifying what happened to us as having been a good thing. Like all of us, I have experienced real malice and cruelty in my life - that has to remain acknowledged as malice and cruelty.

So forgiveness would seem to be a two-step process. First it would be the realization that something cruel or malicious was done, but we would be able to avoid feeling the normal responses to that. We would rise above the need for retribution. We would be able to say, "Yes, that person was cruel. That person wanted to hurt me. That person went out of his/her way to hurt me. But I control my emotional states and I do not have to return feelings of malice for feelings of malice. I can let these negatives emotions go. I have to let these feelings go - they are wrong."

I guess the same would apply to the person who hurt us. We have to remember the lousy things we have done and realize how flawed all of us are or can be. Again, it is simply a matter of recognizing the negative emotion we feel and letting it go. We don't have to replace it with anything, we just have to realize that we have the capacity to rise above retributive emotions.

If you look at Ehsai's amazing painting above, we see that some of his text seems to be reaching higher and some seems to be probing lower. The text looks like a congestion with branches growing above and roots growing below. This image can represent the process of God reaching down for us and us reaching up to meet God. Or it can represent the growth process of putting down roots into the earth, into our ancient, biological lives and raising ourselves to meet a higher principle.

Do you like thoughtful writing? If so, please read some of my essays from The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

August Vilella - a will-less will that guides his painting

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One night, just a few years ago, August Vilella dropped a gob of paint onto a canvas and began pushing it around with his brush, watching as various characters began to emerge. Previously he had had no artistic training. He had studied philosophy and was composing and performing music with his punk rock band, working on an epic (unfinished) philosophical novel which stretches more than 1,000 pages. 

This was the beginning of Vilella’s painting process, as he comes to the canvas with no preconceived concepts or drawings, and simply begins creating. His works resound with viewers as he is often among the most popular artists at fairs, sells widely and is now one of the hottest artists out of Spain, having won prestigious awards at international art fairs.

By just starting with paint on a canvas and going with the flow, he is removing his overt, conscious will from the painting process. He is not what I like to call a “symbol hunter”, looking for different images which, in conjunction with each other, create a visual allegory. This symbol hunting was mocked and impugned anyway through the work of folks like Rauschenberg and Rauch. 

Vilella dives into a bowl of Jungian primordial soup meeting the chance operations of Duchamp and Cage. Chance operations was always about setting our flawed wills and desires aside and opening ourselves to new possibilities which we, ourselves, would never have been able to create. A religious person would say we are opening ourselves to Providence, others might say we are opening ourselves to our own deep, subconscious minds. This is what Vilella also believes.

Vilella, through his process, opens himself to discover what he may be truly experiencing, what he may be in denial about, what is really lurking down there. Interestingly, his work is figurative. You would think he would be throwing gobs of paint at a canvas while screaming or dripping stuff while completely inebriated to get to his deep-seated stuff. 

No, we do not look at the brushstrokes or drip patterns to determine what his inner state of being might be. The inner state he reflects is in the form of figures against backgrounds using a fine, varnished painting technique that hearkens back to Velazquez and El Greco.

The backgrounds are now developed through the traditional technique of “veladuras” in which the artist uses many fine layers of paint to achieve what Jose Ignacio Ruiz Caparros (President of the Spanish National Art Association) described to me as “…magic gradings that create an incredibly dark atmosphere.” 

The figures which appear on the canvas as manifestations of Vilella’s will-less process are often dominated by huge eyes but ethereal or disintegrating bodies. Indeed, wide-open eyes can mean lots of things – wonder, curiosity, intense fear, shock… the ambiguity of open eyes allows us to, basically, impute our emotions to the figures. The eyes engage us to try to understand how imaginary figures might be feeling through our own introspection and by our identification with otherworldly characters.

Yet, when we think of which creatures evolution accorded big eyes to, we can think of owls or birds, in general, or insects; yet Vilella’s eyes do not seem to be compound eyes, they are more like owl eyes. Are these predatory, nocturnal figures where evolution diminished other body parts to strengthen the capacity to perceive and hunt? No, these figures do not have the accompanying claws which come with big eyes. 

Well, it could be these are creatures with the capacity to identify but not to hunt. It seems to me that these are often passive creatures who see but do not always take action. They are born hunters lacking the tools to hunt. Indeed, their eyes are bigger than their stomachs in that their bodies are often smoke-like or cracking while the eyes are substantial and real. I think what makes these works appeal to so many people is the vulnerability or helplessness of the figures with big eyes but no claws and disintegrating bodies. Perhaps we all feel like this much of the time.

These are creatures blessed with huge eyes who seem to realize that eyes are not enough. They may be praying for an inner process, or an outer divine or political process, which can hunt for them based on what they see. They seem to realize that one must surrender to something higher and look inward. 

Indeed, the eyes in these paintings are like giant planets waiting to engage in a supernova implosion, where one’s entire orientation, given to one through nature, is found faulty, and one begins the long and arduous search inward. Vilella’s will-less process reveals the need for us to become will-less in our own quests to develop further.

Do you like thoughtful, pro-social, positive writing? Read Daniel Gauss' essays at The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

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Rocky Landscapes by Darthea Cross

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The type of landscape painting that Darthea Cross does has a history behind it which might be subtitled “from allegory to entropy.” Like all the best contemporary landscape painting, one becomes aware of the expectations concerning the experience and contemplation of nature we bring to it, and the limits of what we tend to derive from a direct experience and contemplation of nature. Given what the great landscape artists of the past expected from nature, based on the agendas they brought to nature, Cross’ work asks, “Do we have to leave our visits to nature feeling disappointed?” In response, her work is infused with an optimism for her genre, based on the understanding that we need not approach nature for spiritual, scientific or even environmentalist lessons and that being shorn of these encumbrances, in its liberation from our willful approach to it, nature possesses a stark reality of engagement that can provide a wholly personal experience, a presence of nature divorced from cultural expectations, a phenomenology of stones as opposed to sermons in the stones.

And this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in the stones and good in everything.

(From Shakespeare’s As You Like It)

Dutch painters created the genre of landscape painting, in the West, around the time when Shakespeare wrote these lines about leaving the city and experiencing nature so that trees, brooks and stones could produce speech, books and sermons for us. Nature had been used as a source of symbolic and allegorical meanings before the Dutch, and later the German and English Romantics, began searching for something ineffable in nature which would transcend symbolism. When Shakespeare wrote of the sermons that could be conveyed through rock or stone, they were predicated on the perceived permanence or eternal nature of rock that empowered it with special spiritual meaning within a cultural tradition. Read closely and you will see that the Tower of Babel collapses only because it was built of inferior materials (brick and slime) and not of stone and mortar. In the turning of water into wine, the containers which are filled with water, allowing a mystical transformation, were hewn of rock. You drink wine, the blood of God, and become joyous, forgiving, tolerant and kind – the drinking of wine represented a behavioral transformation. The understanding of rock, early on, was as a symbol for part of a transformational process forming the core of the mystical aspect of the Christian religion.

So, looking at landscapes in the past was easy – you found allegories in them that mirrored your culturally inspired spiritual belief. With the Romantics, rock changed and you either experienced the sublime, the beautiful or the picturesque, which alleged to obviate cognition and meaning altogether, but still retained spiritual aspects (as in the work of Casper David Friedrich). After Darwin and further scientific study, however, we learned that nature was older than 4,500 years and not what we thought nature to be at all, and that nature was, in fact, constant change and merciless competition. Rocks were no longer eternal and went through their own cycles of creation, destruction and remolding. Rocks are constantly cracking, breaking up into sediments, being crushed back into other forms. Despite this cycle of regeneration, Robert Smithson ultimately saw entropy when he looked at nature and said, “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediments is a text containing limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.”

Darthea Cross’ work, to me, is a type of response to Smithson, like an unfurling or reconfiguration of his spiral jetty, like taking stones and rocks out of his set pieces and returning them back to nature, where they came from. Smithson’s awareness of entropy caused him to create images of entropy until he became trapped in a reinforcing feedback loop of his own making. He began seeking entropy in nature instead of approaching nature untainted by ideology each time. Losing our capacity to impute meaning in the presence of nature is a novel experience in itself. To stand before nature, without a belief system or preconceived ideas, is a phenomenological experience and what appeals to me the most in regard to Cross’ work is this constant freshness in her relationship to the rocks on the coast of Maine that she paints, and how this guilelessness translates into the contours and lines and soft colors of the pieces themselves.

Cross told me, “I found the inspiration for my current body of work at a cove in mid-coast Maine. My paintings reflect the various rock formations along the coast and in the mountains throughout the state. As with all my work, these paintings are a visual chronicle of my continued exploration of the deep silence within nature, as well as within ourselves. These moments of quietude offer a glimpse, a reflection, of the profound wholeness of which everything is a part. I am intrigued by the interplay of color and line in each of the parts, whether that part is a close observation of a tidal pool and a rock crevice or a distant view of a mountain peak or valley. Each of my paintings begins by following nature and never completely leaves the natural context. Realistic contour lines provide an entry point for the viewer; other lines establish a sense of the abstract by creating flat or formless spaces. Similarly, the color scheme originates in nature but is not confined to it. As I work I am reliving the walk – the location of the subject matter – and I am reminded of the duality between the fragility of nature and its power and magnitude.”

Cross’ work is visually arresting, our eyes want us to linger over the images. She has been stopped in her tracks by this scenery, attracted to continually work with it and stops us in the process. She has begun moving toward greater and greater abstraction based on her work dealing with the rocks of Maine and it is a type of abstraction that avoids the ambiguity which leads to discomfort, confusion and anxiety and, instead, leads to an even greater desire to engage the natural world. Viewing her landscapes becomes the subtle and longing pain of desire itself, the hope that some deeper meaning may, indeed, be possible after all.

Read more essays from Daniel Gauss at: Excellent Writing by Daniel Gauss

Interview with Paul Glabicki - previously posted on wsimag.com

{{{The Light #7}}}

Paul Glabicki is a multi-media artist represented by the Kim Foster Gallery in Manhattan. His work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern, Cannes, and the New York Film Festival, among other prestigious venues. His work plays with the ‘delicate thresholds between abstract and figurative form’ and he has used animation as a way of ‘constructing or reconstructing perceptual experience in time’. His work often seems to deal with the inevitable creation and use of language or symbols as signifiers, while also pointing to the limits of these signifiers in the exploration of our inner reality of emotions, motives and cognitive processes. 

{{{Topography #1}}}

Tell us a little about your new Topography series you are working on. How is it similar to or different from the last two series: Relativity and The Light?

The genesis of a new series tends to emerge while one is immersed in a current project. I like to write down ideas that come to me while I’m working, sometimes a simple word or potential title.   The concept of the RELATIVITY series was generated while creating the previous ORDER series – in part because the ORDER works were a relentless collection of expressions and interpretations of organization, classification, and categorization of data. 

Einstein came up during research and a search for ORDER data. Light was a central element in Einstein’s RELATIVITY research and experimentation about space and time. I was fascinated by the imagery used to convey complex notions of physics – in Einstein’s own writings and in various studies of his work. After reading so much about the properties of light from a scientist’s perspective, I began to think about light in religious symbolism, as visual experience, and the theories of Josef Albers, as expressed in the history of art. Botticelli’s drawings of spectral spirits in his “Dante’s Inferno” drawings, memories of orbs of green light representing spirits seen during Kabuki Theater performances in Japan, and the prismatic angel wings of Fra Angelico’s frescos at the San Marco in Florence all became key references. 

Alber’s studies with yellow hue (luminous, especially with yellow on white) set a goal of working primarily with yellow – a color I tended to avoid. All of these ideas emerged while working on RELATIVITY. The first drawing of each of my series really sets the premise or thesis of the body of work to follow. At that starting point, I had a list of concepts and parameters ready and waiting to take form.

While working on THE LIGHT (and while looking at work uncovered during my university studio exit process), I really began to think about recurrent compositional and technical strategies in my work that focused on surface, layering, and strata of information. The idea of geologists or archeologists analyzing layers of earth and sediment - to navigate through signatures of time - appealed to me. The notion of topography, examining the nature of surfaces, provided a conceptual framework to consider landscape, pigment and mark making, other surfaces – skin, layering of surfaces, and other associations. TOPOGRAPHY #1 features imagery and graphic form, as well as interaction between the properties of paint, pencil, and ink on my prime surface – paper.  Topographical maps also inspired the use of contour drawings of my own hand, references and play with scale, and new compositional strategies.

{{{Relativity #4}}}

Can you explain the relationship between your experimental films and drawings?

My central body of work in 16mm experimental animation was essentially constructed by drawing.  Each successive film moved toward an aesthetic of making each drawing/each single frame a work that was unique and which could be viewed as a unique work of art. This is most apparent in OBJECT CONVERSATION (1985) and UNDER THE SEA (1989), both of which introduced color, as well as collage fragments and other data unique to each drawing. From my very first look at an actual strip of 8mm film, I loved the unique character of each individual frame. I studied how the camera documented motion – everything from a slight blur, to degree of change from frame to frame. Drawing each frame made me the camera, but working from my mind, eye and hand. I usually constructed my animated films as a series of cycles or as a specific compositional space, adding and layering detail by adding new information behind or on top of other completed layers. I never moved the camera position (zooms, pans, tracking). Each shot was a self-contained motion composition.  I loved working on a light table and viewing transparent successive frames and degrees of change simultaneously, guided by my motion templates on the bottom layer.  My non-film works on paper and canvas are often analogous to this process.

{{{Film-Wipe-Film}}}

Is your work process art, does your art represent cognitive processes or something else?

The animated films, which were designed to fit into a temporal context using image and sound, were anchored by cognitive processes, specifically perception and memory.  Film theory – especially the formal realm of Eisenstein and the analytical world of semiotics provided models for giving form to personal experiences and awareness of cognitive processes. I was really fascinated by perception as a simultaneous selection and processing of information – intuitive or conscious, subjective, responsive, reactive, objective. A memory can recall a sound, touch, or smell, one’s gaze can be deliberately fixed on a specific point while recalling a completely different image/thought/association, sounds can suggest space or a visualization of an object. Language can become image, and images can become language. All of this happens while walking down the street: looking, listening, and allowing the incoming data to sift through one’s layers of consciousness.

I’ve always played with delicate thresholds between abstract and figurative form. Film permitted endless ways to process and present input to the viewer.  FILM-WIPE-FILM (1983) constantly shifts between abstract and figurative uses of image and sound. An abstract sequence may be accompanied by the sound of birds or water. A moving geometric shape might generate the sound of a chair being dragged across the floor. Working within the static space of a piece of paper or canvas, sound input and motion can be implied or suggested by other visual associations or text.  I’m very selective and I always considered the gestural physicality of Pollock to be very selective. Pollock’s work is an accumulation and history of a relentless process of layering pigment on a surface. My work has its own relentless process, but it’s centered on the layering of information, graphic form, and data. So, your question is very perceptive, my work is process, cognitive, representational, and abstract, and at (for me) it’s most effective when it’s all happening simultaneously.

{{{The Moon}}}

You’ve experimented a bit with the ‘narrative’…

My last handmade animated film UNDER THE SEA (1989) was indeed an experiment in bringing narrative into my non-linear and abstract universe. I extracted narrative fragments from five classic novels. There were several scripts for each novel – one included extended text and dialogue, another key phrases, another had lists of places and props, another translated into German, French, Japanese, and Indian Sanskrit. Actors and narrators recorded vocal interpretations of the scripts – some in character, some in foreign languages. The film featured some of my most complex animation (in color) and sound editing, cryptic/coded animated alphabets, sub-titles and text compositions.  The narrative fragments interact and overlay, but (most) audiences can identify all (if not most) of the source novels. That’s the closest I’ve gotten to an approach to narrative in film.  I did do a drawing series in the early 2000s called ALL AT ONCE that transcribed the entire text of Jung’s book SYNCHRONICITY from start to finish.  The text was systematically woven between and around images and other visual data collected at the time the drawing was made. An amazing number of Jungian “meaningful coincidences” occurred as the text was transcribed. With patience and effort, one could also read the book from start to finish.

{{{Object Conversation}}}

Can you tell me about the impact of music on your work?

Music has always had an impact on my work.  Classical music is central, although I like to sample a variety of musical forms, especially as I work. A concerted effort to listen to opera while making FILM-WIPE-FILM helped shaped the film’s rhythms. I especially like composers who play with narrative or cyclical repetition: Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley. I’m attracted to composers who also play with language, including the diverse, ambitious and often non-linear works of Stephen Sondheim (his recent two volume publication on writing lyrics is a great look at a very specific type of language quite alien to me). Music of other cultures is also important.

Can you give us a hint as to what insights you are conveying into the use of language in some of your work?

Language has always fascinated me – the look, the sound, the connection to things (names, signs, symbols, cultural context). It’s at once descriptive, subjective, objective, rhythmic, and beautiful to look at. My undergraduate school had a not-so-popular course in calligraphy that was a revelation to me. I’ve always liked to look at ancient writing, writing from various cultures, mathematical equations, font designs, and forms of calligraphy. Not being capable of reading or understanding a written or spoken language made it all the more interesting. I envisioned my work as a singular, personal kind of language (image and sound) that represented aspects of my own admittedly eccentric mindset and voice.

{{{Object Conversation}}}

 I once wrote: 'Glabicki seems to point out that all of our symbols derive from the outer world and are insufficient for us to explore the inner world.  Ultimately, after a painstaking commitment to semiotics, we are invited to leave it for something better.' Was I on the right track here?

You are absolutely correct.  I always loved Laurie Anderson’s song (based on a quote by William S. Burroughs), “Language is a virus from outer space.” No matter how many signs, symbols, words, numbers, colors, objects are used to create a statement, there is always a danger of (or, in my case, a desire for) ambiguity, and alternate readings and interpretations.  I always remember the noble effort of Carl Sagan and others to enclose a golden phonograph record and set of diagrammatic plaques on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft mission.  Each plaque tried to depict specific data about humanity and life on earth – most famously there was an image of a nude male and female, with the male holding up his arm with a welcoming wave.  It immediately became clear, and controversial - that this image and gesture could be wildly misinterpreted by some alien civilization.  Even this most humanly articulate desire to communicate through sight, sound, and symbol became a landmark of the futility of escaping the limits of language and our human constructs of communication and organization. DJ Spooky recently did a witty installation and performance based on this classic case of ambiguity.  Ironically, it’s this very ambiguity and sense of disorientation that makes art compelling.  In my case, it’s not so much a search for something better, but something transporting, playful, or that embraces the sense or nonsense of it all.

{{{Relativity #1}}}

In recent email to me you wrote: "...sorting out 40 years of stored work (finding out what to do with so much work in so many mediums) was an interesting time to get a new perspective on the arc of my career." What did you discover?

It was interesting to discover so many threads and connections to current work, as well as dialogues/contrasts/overlays between concurrent activity in different media (film animation, photography, painting, drawing, digital media, installation art) in various decades from the 1970s to present. There was an increasing immersion in process, concept, and technique in the handmade animated films from the 1970s to 1989 (increasingly complex spatial schematics and motion design, degree of detail, amount of information encoded into each drawing for each frame). The complex “motion templates” (pencil drawings of motion paths placed on the light table to guide the frame-by-frame drawing process) clearly pointed to the decade of work in evolving digital media – and actually gave me a conceptual framework to make the transition to digital spatial configurations.

Painting/works on paper created separately, but concurrently with hand-drawn animation projects, often became more abstract or more about color, or explored compositional ideas quite different from the films.  Photography also provided other avenues to explore time and sequence. Travel – especially several trips to Japan – also had an impact on work produced at the time. The constant production of work in a variety of media (including installation) – while also dealing with the energy and demands of full-time teaching at a university was something I didn’t think about until I began to clear out my studio space upon retirement.

The 1990s was a decade of rapid evolution of digital media and software. I began an interaction with simple pixel-by-pixel drawings, limited to 30 to 100 colors, floppy discs, and 1 or 2 MB of RAM/memory (AMIGA 2000 computer).  I began work in digital immediately after completing my final hand drawn 16mm, UNDER THE SEA (1989), with the goal of producing images and animation impossible to create by hand.  The arc of my digital work produced from 1990 to 2001 paralleled the rapid development of the medium as well as the rapid access to more and more sophisticated hardware and software to artists (as with film animation, my digital interaction was self-taught).

The process and techniques of my hand drawn films really prepared me for this new medium. By 1991-92, I was creating animation cycle pieces (each cycle stored on the memory capacity of an individual disc, with data/detail composed and edited to fit the disc capacity), transferring multiple cycles to videocassette for exhibition.  By the mid-1990s, I was creating far more elaborate spaces using modeling software – with still images used to create 3D projected dioramas for installations.  By 1999 – 2001, I was fully engaged in digital animation and the sound of complex modeled spaces presented on video – RED FENCE (1999), FULL MOON (2001).  All of the software and hardware rapidly became obsolete, with much of the actual digital work (except for work transferred to videocassettes) no longer accessible. 

In 2001, I was confronted with issues of preservation – not just the previous decade of digital investigation, but of the 16mm film materials dating back to the 1970s.  Ironically, all of the work on canvas or paper looked as fresh and pristine as ever.  Also in 2001, feeling somewhat drained by the expense of maintaining digital media and constant grant writing, I decided to focus again on handmade images – at first as a sort of sabbatical from animation.  The drawing series/projects from 2001 to the present were liberating, but clearly reflected the experiences, methods, concepts, processes and techniques of all that came before.  Still, it was daunting to figure out what to do with hundreds of floppy discs and other obsolete digital hardware and software. Much was destroyed.

Your work was recently included in a retrospective of experimental animation at the Tate in London. I got the feeling that the air got sucked out of the experimental film movement in the 90s. How 'alive' are experimental films these days - are we stuck to just retrospectives? Can somebody write about the rise and fall of experimental films or is this genre still alive and kicking? 

I think the retrospectives and looking into the past is important.  Film and the changing domain of media art have a relatively short history, and its fragility and impermanence can be alarming. Viewing habits, presentation, and access to films have rapidly changed.  The audience’s knowledge of and relationship to “cinema” varies widely. This is especially true of experimental film, which inherently appeals to or reaches a much smaller, selective audience. 

I know first hand the dilemma of addressing the preservation and access to my own work – encompassing Super-8mm and 16mm film, reel-to reel video, chemical-based and digital photography, VHS cassettes and S-VHS Video, floppy discs, and never ending changes in formats and storage.  I came to accept the ephemeral nature of media art, and the irony that paper, pencil, brush and canvas have offered much more permanence and stability. Still, it’s not all gloom and doom. Experimental film is alive and well in new manifestations.  I was privileged to serve as a juror for the 2011 Punto Y Raya Festival, a wonderful international festival focused on point, line and abstract expression in a variety of media (though primarily all levels of digital media).  The beauty and range of activity, experimentation, technique, and imagery was astounding! I never met the other jurors. I viewed the works on CDs, and communicated and conferred online. 

It was strange to experience a “festival” alone, yet feeling an undeniable connection and participation with an audience scattered all over the world.  The experience was truly inspiring and refreshing.  To be honest, it was the first time in 20 years that I thought about or considered experimental animation and film.  I thought my eccentric decades in 16mm film were pretty much forgotten, and that I moved on to a different mode of expression.  It’s been gratifying to become aware that those films have been remembered, and even important to new artists.  In 2013, FACT, Liverpool, UK, and ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted a monumental exhibition expanding over 100 years of cinema and digital media titled: TYPEMOTION: Type as Image in Motion.  I was surprised and gratified to be included. 

Most recently, as you pointed out, curator Herb Shellenberger organized “INDEPENDENT FRAMES: American Experimental Animation of the 1970s – 1980s” at the Tate Modern, UK.  It was exciting to see that era celebrated, and perhaps inspire a new generation of innovators who may or may never have seen those films. My exhibitions at Kim Foster Gallery have brought new audiences and reconnection with the experimental film community. This kind of activity looking back, looking now, looking forward is promising and confirms that experimental discourse is alive and well.  After a lull in the 1990s, virtual reality is getting interesting again.  Some of the energy and invention of the CD-Rom era (again, Laurie Anderson, and her “Puppet Motel”) is morphing into new notions of interactive experience. 

Hwang Young-Sung - Solo Show at Gallery Shchukin, Chelsea

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Hwang Young-Sung was born in the early 1940s in Korea and, consequently, suffered through part of the Japanese occupation and the entire Korean War - during which he became an orphan. He was born in Gwangju, in the province that engendered South Korea’s Nobel Peace Prize winning president Kim Dae-Jung, who seemed to embody that region’s spirit of strength, democracy and independence. Indeed, Gwangju was where the military dictator Chun Doo-Hwon massacred student protesters on May 18, 1980 – a protest Hwang participated in. He suffered through the dark days of occupation, war and extreme poverty (after the Korean War South Korea was one of the poorest nations on the planet) and survived through the days of brutal dictators to see a more democratic government in his homeland. He is currently the Director of the Gwangju Museum of Art and Emeritus Professor of Art at Chosun Unversity. Although admirably committed to his people and country, his work transcends any type of regional classification and embodies international influences from various eras.

At Shchukin the show focuses on his work from the 90s onward and this work might be best classified as being ‘semiotic’ in nature.  As you can see from the images presented, Hwang seems to create what might be called pictograms in large grid patterns. Some pictograms are recognizable objects, numbers or animals but we don’t know whether each pictogram represents a sound, the object presented or a concept related to or potentially unrelated to the image. Different pictograms could even serve different functions hypothetically. We don’t even know in which direction the text should be read from. So the first question would seem to be: what does it mean to be confronted by an indecipherable language?

First, obviously, when we see text we want to know what it means. Someone is presenting something for us to learn something from and we feel a sense of frustration from inaccessible information locked in foreign characters. Frustration normally leads to aggression. Yesterday when entering my neighborhood Chinese take-out place, I stepped on a mat that had four Chinese characters on it. It bugged me that I had no idea what the characters meant – they could have meant, “Welcome!” “Please die! We hate working here.” “Your amygdala in the limbic system of your brain is the seat of the aggression you feel now.” “The meaning of life is blah blah blah…” “Our food sucks ha ha you sucker.” – anything. So looking at Hwang’s indecipherable grids we can feel a sense of inner pain and aggression due to the frustration and ambiguity that comes from an inability to read text we believe might be meaningful. We feel a sense of desire to know what is, basically, unreachable and are left helpless.

Hwang’s pieces also force us to think of what, basically, language can and cannot convey – just how important might the content be of any indecipherable language that we can’t get? What’s the most meaningful content that can possibly be stored in symbols and to what extent can it change those of us who read it? A Meso-American researcher worked months to decipher a text and was shocked to find that the beginning said: “This text contains everything you need to know to live well and to fully understand the universe.” Upon taking another month to decipher the rest of the text, he realized it was nothing but a child’s math-lesson text from 1,000 years ago. Maybe we expect too much from textual material – maybe text is not sufficient to provide us with all the insights we need to develop into the most humane beings possible so that we can live meaningfully in relation to each other, our society and the planet. Maybe we need to reject text and the word at some point and dive deep inside ourselves and surrender to learning and change through experience to supplement what can be spelled out for us.

Also, when language was created, when symbols were created (first sounds and then images) they must have been created to represent actual physical stuff in the world. If you think about it, any language we might use for processes in our inner world is always metaphorical. Even the term ‘emotion’ comes from the Old French term ‘emouvoir’ which means ‘to stir up something’. So when we think about stuff that goes on inside of us (motives, emotions, desire, thought-processes) we use objects taken from the outer world as markers to understand and express what is happening. If we feel frustrated we imagine an actual physical obstacle, a sense of emotional liberation can be described using a metaphor like a soaring bird or some obstacle being removed. We have no language for our inner reality – our language symbols double for the outer and inner worlds. We use objects and relationships between objects to also describe inner states or situations.

Many of the pictographs in Hwang’s pieces seem to be shapes with mirror images, one half a darker color and the other half a lighter color. Could he be pointing at this dual aspect of language – that language can represent outer and inner states using the same signs? Many of the signs also contain darker and lighter elements – again, does this point to the dual nature of language? Darker and lighter can imply ‘active’ and ‘passive’ or ‘desire’ and ‘fulfillment’. In the more abstract pictograms each symbol possibly derives its meaning by the proportion of active and passive or light and dark in the piece. The objects which can be recognized, furthermore, show how symbols can serve as markers for inner reality. So we see a snake – what is it about the snake that gives it possible meaning for our inner reality? The snake in the Garden of Eden story seemed to symbolize a desire for something more than God had made available to us. Why was the snake used this way in various types of sacred literature? The snake has no arms/legs and so in the ancient world this meant the snake had no creative capacity and had to steal everything it needed. So the image of the snake becomes one of spiritual thief, an inner desire to take what really isn’t ours.

Another key to understanding Hwang’s work also seems to be that he seems to lament the loss of traditional rural culture in modern Korean history. Some writers have seen references to ancient Korean images that represent guardian figures of villages as well as references to other aspects of Korean traditional life. The predominance of animal shapes also hearkens back to a pre-industrial Korea which was unified and peaceful. I even caught images of the number 38 in some of his paintings, which would obviously refer to the 38^th parallel – the dividing line of contemporary Korea.

Gallery Shchukin has been around for about a year now in NY City and Arte Fuse was the first arts source to review one of the shows at this new and remarkable cultural resource. Shchukin has contributed greatly to the NY Arts scene in the past year and is even currently partly sponsoring a show on Russian “shamanism” at The National Arts Club (which I fully intend to cover as well). And, let me tell you something, they have delicious finger-food at their openings! Yummy yummy!

Hwang Young-Sung

Beyond the Grid

May 28 – June 24 2015

Gallery Shchukin

524 W. 19th Street

New York, NY 10011

  

History - A Sampling of African American Art at Bill Hodges Gallery

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To me the current group show at Bill Hodges Gallery asks such questions as: Historically, how have African American artists had to navigate through an art world dominated by white artists, gallery owners and critics? How have things changed since the time of Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence? To what extent do black artists owe the black community something in their work and to what extent should they ignore race? Can a black artist truly ignore race in his/her work? Has art reflecting the black experience been finally ‘integrated’ into the dominant culture ‘white’ gallery scene or are ‘black’ artists still marginalized and considered ‘black artists’ instead of just plain ‘artists’? How might we change things so that all meaningful experience is validated?

Due to racial segregation and discrimination in the USA, African American visual artists often learned of the latest trends and movements in the contemporary art world, but could not necessarily expect to become active contributors. At the Bill Hodges Gallery, one of the artists in the “History” show is Norman Lewis, often called ‘the first African American abstract expressionist’. Indeed, he seems to have known and worked with Pollock and Rothko and although he got gallery shows and some attention, he certainly did not get the attention or acclaim he deserved for his contributions to Abstract Expressionism.

This was definitely due to the racism among art buyers and art critics of the time and also due to the fact that Lewis, even when engaging in Abstract Expressionism, never seemed to wholly abandon some representational features, which made his work seem less personal and more politically oriented toward statements about the black experience in America. So if you were black and drew upon your experience within an oppressive dominant culture, to make an existential statement to enrich the lives of others of any race, your experience was not valued and you were marginalized as an “African American” artist, the same way women were marginalized. Unfortunately, Lewis is still sometimes known for the novelty of being the black guy who was doing what the famous white guys were doing, although, in my humble estimation, his work seems deeper, more meaningful and more experimental than the work of most Abstract Expressionists.

In the show we see a priceless earlier work by Lewis, when he seemed to still be in his Social Realism stage, just before painting his most famous representational work: The Yellow Hat.  There is an aging, bulky African American lady, dressed up for an occasion and clutching something with her right hand (flowers?). She is at a table with a bottle beside her. The delicacy of her right hand, draped over her knee, is in contrast to the left hand clenched around the stems. The tilt of her head and closed eyes indicate some type of (romantic?) reverie. It could be that Lewis was poking fun at someone in his community, a bit past her prime, dreaming of love, but the artist also allows us to witness a person experiencing an inner event and in trying to understand her inner state we can see the possibilities and limitations for shared experiences –  what do we do, exactly, when we want to understand how another is feeling? Why are we drawn to do this? To what extent can we replicate another’s experience in ourselves just by observing it? Paradoxically the drawing puts us into a position of trying to understand a real inner experience in a fictitious person, which is often the central endeavor we engage in looking at art and reading literature.

Jacob Lawrence (the first African American artist to have work displayed at MoMA) once said, “If I have achieved a degree of success as a creative artist, it is mainly due to the black experience which is our heritage – an experience which gives inspiration, motivation, and stimulation.” Lawrence, as evidenced by the quote above, embraced his identity and used it to break into the mainstream of the art world. He enjoyed painting various series of paintings and is most famous for the 60 piece series titled The Migration of the Negro, which represented the movement of black folks from the South to the North after the end of slavery. African American history was of the utmost importance to Lawrence. In his piece Children at Play we see the sense of community and celebration he found in his racially segregated community, in lieu of despair or apathy.

A number of amazing artists are represented in this show, but one of the highlights for me, and the eye-catcher that brought me into the gallery one Saturday afternoon, was a photo by Mickalene Thomas called Les Trois Femmes Noires. Thomas is an amazing artist who examines issues of black feminine beauty within an over-arching culture where the ideals of beauty may not reinforce a sense of acceptance or joy for black women and she is known for her paintings covered with rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. So how would you characterize the postures and facial expressions of the women to the left of the photo? Thomas is interested in the history of art from a feminist perspective and in previous pieces (like one recently shown at MoMA) focuses on the exploitation of women by male artists as sexual objects of desire. So perhaps this is why the viewer’s gaze is met with a sense of contempt and even confrontation. Their comfort with their bodies and sexuality and their direct gaze at the viewers of the photo create a strong, arresting presence. They seem to enjoy their bodies and their sexuality but they also seem to resent the intrusion.

Robert Jackson: Gummy Lover

Here's another Gallery Henoch artist: Robert Jackson.

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Once when I was riding on the subway in New York City, I saw a little boy who had a small toy shark in one hand and a small toy dinosaur (a triceratops) in the other hand.  He was gleefully entertaining himself by creating a mock battle between these two creatures.

Now, I once took an animal behavior course in college and I know that two predators of two different species rarely just fight each other for the fun of it.  Two creatures from two different periods of time, one a water-dweller and one a land-dweller, never fight it out.  So this was really amusing to me - to see this little kid staging a battle between a shark and a triceratops.  I think aggression and competition are so deeply ingrained in us that we love imagining these hypothetical battles.  I certainly did when I was a kid.

So Jackson's painting resonated with me on this level.  We see what some child might have staged - a toy dinosaur is gobbling up gummy bears. He had a dinosaur and some gummy bears and he put two and two together and came up with this scenario.

To me it represents how readily we absorb the perceptions of our environments and reify them.  This painting both makes sense and doesn't make sense.  It's absurd that a dinosaur would attack gummy bears, but on a deeper level even children understand and have no problem with the nature of a universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and a dog-eat-dog world, so such a bizarre and hypothetical encounter becomes real to us.

Can we also interpret this painting as an allegory?  Is the dinosaur an aggressive, violent and malicious element that must be extirpated from our lives (like the minotaur)?  Are the gummy bears innocent little sacrificial lambs that must be protected and saved? 

I think I'm spending too much time thinking about this painting....:P

Here is Jackson's latest dinosaur painting:

It's almost a parody of the obsession an archeologist might have to categorize old fossils of strange creatures.  Does this obsession come from a childhood (childish?) inclination?  After all, who made the T-Rex the "king" of the dinosaurs???!!!

Read the essays of Daniel Gauss on Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

Buy Dan a cup of coffee? https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielgaus6

Yayoi Kusama

Most of Kusama's work is shown at one of the Gagosian galleries in Manhattan, although I've seen some pieces spread around at other places.

We live in a universe which had a beginning and which will have a death. And, we live in a universe for which the simple questions: "How could something come from nothing?" or "How could something always have been?" cannot be answered. We live in a constant state of decay and our lives are a constant struggle for self-justification and a search for meaning and validation in a dream-like, grim and often ridiculous state.

Confronted with this type of life, Yayoi Kusama has created huge canvases of ever-repeating patterns. Often polka-dots. Sometimes flowers. In past pieces she is sometimes seen naked and covered in polka dots as well.

The concept of infinite repetition is the center-piece of her work. As a child she suffered brutal treatment at the hands of her mother and visions of the infinite appeared to her as a response to this suffering. Therefore, the essential element of this artist's identity can be understood as an ordered and systematic response to cruelty emerging from the pain itself. Pain becomes the source of a vision of perfection and the infinite that can only cover the universe, not change it.

Perhaps this is why the artist has said repeatedly that her art is an attempt at self obliteration. It is also as if the infinity of polka-dots has a therapeutic value. Systems of thought and art have a softening effect on the realities of brutality and absurdity. In the very creation of the infinity of flowers and dots there is a loss of self, a covering of the component parts of experience by an ideal vision of life that destroys the essence of life for a pattern engendered by the harsher aspects of life.

This is also why the artists work is often performative in nature. The process involved is essential to the work, not the final product. The artist David Judd once even went so far as to say that a painting by Kusama is a result of her work and not a work in itself. One of Kusama's canvases is the result of her embrace of the visions generated through her pain and experience, the essence of the artist's identity and art.

This also helps to explain why Kusama's spaces in galleries, especially in NYC from 58 to 68, were totally defined by art. It was her desire to create entire environments of repetitive patterns because this is the type of life we surround ourselves with. We insulate ourselves in our visionary and often idealistic patterns and attempt to structure a world that will correspond to such patterns. From Marat through Marx to the present day these patterns are tattooed onto our realities and forge our identities into pleasant experiences.

Kusama now lives in a mental hospital in Tokyo. She has stated that if it were not for art she would have killed herself long ago. This is a revealing statement from an artist who has implied that all of our identities are visions of repetitive patterns of pleasant polka-dots and flowers in the face of unanswerable yet simple questions.