Edward Hopper Looks at the American Hotel - Newfields, Indianapolis

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Edward Hopper often painted scenes where human habitation ends and where nature begins. He points to our simultaneous inclusion in and divorce from the natural world, what shape the modern, urban world takes in relation to nature and how this molds the individual in the city. 

In many of his paintings he shows the results of how we have reconstructed nature to our needs and desires instead of accepting a predetermined function within it, while nature looms as an awesome but threatening force of alluring entropy just outside our windows or front doors. 

He enjoyed painting railroad tracks because these were the thin dendrites that connected human habitations within the vastness of the natural world while the tracks also represented our departure from that world. An exhibit in Indianapolis at Newfields examines Hopper’s paintings of hotel rooms within this whole context in the show: Edward Hopper and the American Hotel.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave finds himself in a hotel room constructed by aliens. When Kubrick was envisioning this hotel room, he thought of how we try to add interesting rocks and trees and other natural elements in zoo enclosures to make the animals feel at home. So Kubrick added little touches like neo-classical French sculpture to Dave’s hotel room. A hotel room is, basically, a substitute for one’s bedroom created for the traveler from one city through nature to another. 

The little touches reassure one that one is safe, surrounded by comfort. Yet the hotel is also a place of isolation as the expectations of the city inhibit interpersonal communication as we see in Hopper’s Hotel Lobby. A couple and a young woman are in each other’s presence but meaningful communication is impossible. The couple themselves have little to talk about, but feel tied to each other nonetheless. We are accorded this type of companionship.

The people in Hopper’s hotel rooms often seem to be looking out the windows. Are they looking at what we have abandoned? Do they feel a longing for nature even though we are no longer suited for it, the way Yeats could hear the lapping of the ocean waves against a shore while standing on a roadway? These figures seem to be planning, plotting, hoping, waiting. They are looking outside as we do not get the impression that hotels are for introspection. If we see a person reading, for example, the person is clearly killing time and not searching for anything life transforming. Hopper is depicting movement in the outer world and not change within ourselves.

In the painting 11AM we see a woman completely naked except for her shoes, sitting in a comfy chair and staring outside, elbows on knees, hands together in anxiety, not in prayer. In Hotel by the Railroad we see a couple, each absorbed in his or her own thoughts, the woman reading, the man looking speculatively at the railroad tracks. In South Carolina Morning a woman stands at her door looking out at a seemingly endless field of tall grass. 

In Morning Sun a woman sits on her bed staring at the sky through her window expectantly. In Morning in the City we see another naked woman looking through her window as she dresses for the morning, wondering, perhaps, what the day will bring. In Western Motel we see inhospitable yet stately mountains outside the windows. People in the Sun shows well-heeled folks relaxing on wooden folding chairs while looking at distant mountains. It is as if Hopper is sneering at the entire tradition of Western landscape painting and its total misunderstanding of what nature is in relation to humanity.

There are some Hopper works where we are looking through the window at the inhabitants. In Apartment Houses we see a maid in pristine uniform. She is a part of the experience, part of the luxury of the accommodations, but, perhaps, we are invited to view her as more than that and think about why we might completely overlook her in the first place. In Room in New York we see a woman in a red dress distractedly plunking away at piano keys while a formally dressed man studies something intently in a newspaper. In House at Dusk we do not see what is happening inside the rooms, but we can anticipate, basically, what they are doing: the same things we do.

These paintings are about the individual pursuing his/her own ends, how we abandoned community for isolation, success and profit, how we are taught to rely on ourselves and damn everyone else and the loneliness and anxiety this type of life causes. These are rooms where you realize how very little is really expected of us in our lives. How our lives and actions are supposed to be geared to external needs and gains and we feel content when we leap over such a low bar to the acclaim of our peers. These are the outposts of materialism and consumerism, showing little or no humane engagement and very little joy among those depicted. While folks are looking out those windows, or as we gaze on them secretly, they may be feeling they are missing something under a more oppressive sense of denial that precludes further introspection.

We also get a sense of permanence and transience in these paintings. These hotel rooms will last for some time, the travelers will change on nearly a daily basis. There is no recognition of the individual or his/her journey, the goal of the hotel room is to find the common denominator of all travelers and provide a sense of temporary comfort and ease for anyone who might enter. The uniformity of the room mirrors the uniformity of our desires, aspirations and often the essence of our life choices.

The show contains numerous photos of and drawings by Hopper as well as many of his paintings but also includes the work of other artists. I wanted to focus, however, on Hopper in this review. This show is significant in that it challenges the belief that Hopper was just a painter of urban alienation. Hopper’s chief preoccupation went far beyond that and encompassed a monumental theme using the most mundane scenes.

If you like great writing, check out Daniel Gauss' essays at the Good Men Project.  https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/    Add him on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/dgaussqu/ 

Where did the miracles of mercy and compassion come from? Sculpture by Xiang Jing, Jiang Jie, Wang Luyan (OCAT/Shenzhen)

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One interpretation is that the woman in Xiang Jing’s sculpture The End turns her face to the wall and hides it with her hands as a response to the mirror next to her. We might assume the mirror forces her to compare herself with, and she is turning away from, the social expectations of personal beauty which she cannot or does not want to meet. 

Yet, it could be that the presence of the mirror is coincidental to her turning to the wall. It, thus, replicates the image of a grieving woman, reminding us that everything we see is a reflection of light and not reality itself. So, if we feel sympathy or pain, the mirror, as a repeated image, invites us to ask ourselves how a mere image can have such a deep effect on us. Why is it strong in some of us and weak in others? Should we all be responding emotionally in the same manner to this woman’s perceived grief?

Is our grief, originating in a psychological process derived from perception and cognition, something “natural” or something we picked up somewhere? Where did the miracles of compassion and mercy come from? Should we abandon or further embrace our compassion once we begin to understand its true origin in evolution, perception and cognition?

Her grief is real and painful to her, but our perception of her grief is an illusion developed into a mental construction that we use to attempt a real connection with a perceived other that suffers. The origin of our own sympathy shows it to be a “something” that can be examined and not just lived, derived from a psychological process. John Locke pointed out that we are not the beasts that Thomas Hobbes said we were primarily because we feel pain when we see others suffer. This often causes us to stop others from causing pain – the awareness we will also suffer from the pain they cause prompts moral action to stop pain in the world.

Or is it really much more simple than this? The woman does not want to look at herself. She fears that she does not meet physical standards and that her life is easily controlled by the desires and standards of others. The mirror is what we use to check ourselves against the standards of others each day, to see whether we are presentable or likable. Will this rejection of the mirror lead to a new awareness for the young woman or continue her pain daily? Of course, you can imagine the selfies which are being shot with this work of sculpture – as people seem to enjoy standing next to this woman and hiding their faces alongside her while another snaps the shot. What if, in fact, the sculpted woman is hiding her face because she is laughing hysterically?

Dream Butterfly by Jiang Jie shows the illusion of a butterfly made from two women facing each other and arching their backs. It could be a counterbalance to the mirror piece, as the perception and acceptance of another, and the realization that the other accepts and loves you, entails humane development reflected in the emergent form of the butterfly. The self becomes an illusion when one is in love or in a deep sense of connection with the lives of others. Our identity is to be found and lost through and in love with another or others. The physical touch is not as important as the emotional touch in this piece, which is transformational.

The wall notes also reference, as you might expect, the famous story of the philosopher Zhuangzi. He claimed that he dreamed of himself as a butterfly, joyously flying about, living in the moment and fully tasting of all facets of life. Upon waking up he wondered whether he was now a butterfly dreaming himself to be a human. 

There is no discounting the sexual aspects in this piece, and it is two women who comprise the butterfly. Does this piece imagine the fulfillment and growth of someone fully aware of and fully enjoying his/her sexuality, in whatever form it might be? Or, does the piece point to the fact that this type of development coming from one’s true but hidden sexuality is still a “dream butterfly” for many? Is our sexuality phenomenological in that it does not allow for illusion or concepts but only for pure sensory engagement and fulfillment in conjunction with the desire and pleasure of another?

In the Paradoxical Walker series by Wang Luyan we see robotic figures whose feet are not pointed in the same direction as the figure apparently strides forward anyway. The back foot is pointed in the exact opposite direction, 180 degrees in relationship to the front foot. Moving forward has always been represented as both feet pointing in the same forward direction as the intended goal of the person moving. But what if the person moving forward is concerned with moving forward based upon an awareness of and a desire for movement based on reflection, lessons from previous experience and even past failures to respond and react to other people in a human or kind manner.

The inverted back foot now means something. This is the foot of a person who will not make the same regrettable mistakes again. It is the foot pointed to the past to make sure of a better future. It is the foot that learns from mistakes. This is the inverted foot of experience which has changed how the person will live and respond to others in the future. As he/she moves forward, that back foot is rooted in the past and the lessons of the past, that foot represents the benevolent changes in the walker as he/she now moves forward confidently to engage others in a more merciful manner. This seems to represent a capacity to be aware of the preceding choices we failed to make and future responses or actions one now wants to make, in response to the regrets of the past. This is the opposite of living and moving forward in regret while still making the same mistakes over and over again.

If you like great writing, check out Daniel Gauss' essays at the Good Men Project.  https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/    Add him on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/dgaussqu/

Cynthia Polsky: Rediscovered at the Pearl Lam Gallery, Hong Kong

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The dominant art movements in the US in the 1960s and 70s were Pop, Conceptualism, Minimalism, maybe Fluxus. When you think of the most famous artists of this period, not many were women. So if you were a female American artist at this time, interested in your own humane development, open to the artistic influences of Asia through which you had traveled and learned, moved by what you had learned through Balanchine’s innovations to dance, and you created art as a way to better understand your possible growth as a person, oblivious to the trends on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, what were the odds your work would wind up at the Castelli Gallery? Zero, of course.

But this is the definition of real art and what a real artist is – someone who engages in a constant type of feedback process between human development and creation, where the art becomes meaningful to the artist who is growing and guides her growth while others can also benefit from this process of insight, growth and creation. Kandinsky, for example, believed this was what an artist was and did. If this is not what an artist is or should be, then we really do not need art. 

Frankly, there was a lot of art in the 60s and 70s we probably did not need but it was promoted by very sharp and greedy men and it wound up in our art museums because it was collected by the “right” people and written about in the “right” periodicals. There is a lot of art now being created that we probably don’t need. We don’t need soulless experimental formalism or self-referential art, but certain people like to buy it and when they die it goes into MoMA.

The Cynthia Polsky show which recently closed at Pearl Lam’s Hong Kong gallery is a rediscovery or reexamination of the large-scale paintings and works on paper from 1963 to 1974 done by American artist Cynthia Polsky, who was a woman in a male-dominated field and who chose to be inspired and work through techniques and colors she discovered in Asia and not which were chosen to appeal to the market by male art dealers in Manhattan wearing Italian suits and chomping on Cuban cigars. 

Polsky’s palette is influenced by the radiant colors we find in South Asian Rajput and Mughal art and not the colors found in comic books or advertisements. These Asian inspired colors often derived from minerals, plants, shells, and sometimes precious stones. Traces of lines or demarcations sometimes derived from the influence of Chinese ink paintings and Japanese calligraphy.

Balanchine added greater quickness to dance, greater flourishes, more style and expression. Polsky studied these techniques and we can see their influence in her work. We sense progress, fulfilment, subtle change and emergence in her larger paintings. She did not stumble around a canvas creating images to evoke anxiety, conflict or confusion. Her canvases convey rhythm, elegance, vitality, symmetry and style. Polsky, herself, referred to her work as lyrical expressionism.

According to the notes for the show, for her larger works, Polsky applied acrylic paint to unstretched canvas on the floor, with bulky objects in an irregular pattern underneath the canvas to create an uneven surface. She would work intuitively and quickly using sponges or Chinese ink brushes. Polsky would then hang the work up to allow the paint to drip downward on the canvas. 

These drips are what really drew me into her paintings. They represented a type of sudden and emergent dendritic branching or creation of a root system from the density of a specific color. The drips represented outreach and penetration with the background of dense or scarce dots of paint becoming a means of assessing or measuring the new quality.

Polsky’s work, to me, actually, is a logical continuation of the experiments in action art created by Jackson Pollock. I recall one art historian writing that many art critics believed a new humanism would appear in art after Pollock’s innovations and that many were shocked when Pop Art appeared instead. The market and gallery owners were, perhaps, more powerful than what should have or was expected to happen. Indeed, going from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art was quite a bifurcation. 

Art was hijacked by gallery owners and buyers. A more humane art was not sought by the art-buying honchos; why would they want this? Art was steered forever toward the demands of the market place and away from the artist’s personal journey.

Polsky’s tweak of action art involved creating density or sparseness while also combining vibrant colors in seamless patterns toward a psychological effect in her viewers. She engaged in immediate mark-making from the inner to outer worlds, trusting in her intuition and perhaps chance operations to obviate the flaws and deficiencies of the human will while allowing a connection with the consciousness of the observer. 

I am not sure whether Polsky knew this, but chromotherapy was used as a healing process in ancient China. The color red, for example, increased blood circulation while blue was a soothing influence on the viewer. Polsky’s work, in her use of and combination of colors, and in her abstract depiction of a process of emergence, allays pain through the hope of a gentle progression toward a higher and more humane state of being.

Joan Miro: The Poetry of Everyday Life (Hong Kong Museum of Art)

Joan Prats, one of Miró’s dearest friends, once said, “When I pick up a stone it’s a stone. When Miró picks up a stone it’s a Miró.” To a great extent this show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art is about the inevitable process of the objective world becoming transformed by the artist, who then shares this new world with us and encourages us to transform our own worlds for the sake of deriving greater meaning and understanding. 

In Miró’s work, it is as if images have broken free from nature to enter the world of our consciousness. The images break free from nature and transform themselves to become a language that we understand more deeply. Miró makes us believe that there is something about objects in the world that make them want to break free and change for us. The world and our minds naturally collaborate in a process whereby we better see and document our inner lives and the changes necessary in them.

The show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art reveals more clearly what Miró was doing from his very first paintings, which were inspired by the farm where he spent much time. Miró always relished using the ordinary in unexpected ways which transformed the ordinary into poetry. He liked using many of the same common images over and over again, and if you look closely, much of his work is not completely abstract, but abstracted versions of real things. 

Miró seemed to especially like depicting ladders, birds, animals, stars and women. Miró also typically uses colors to balance each other. Red balances black, green balances red. Miró said the initial “mark” or impulse to put paint on a canvas was instinctive for him. From the initial mark-making a sequence would naturally follow.

When we enter the exhibit there is a dark room in which you can lie down on a beanbag chair and stare up at a domed ceiling showing various Miró -inspired constellations. Of course, constellations are prime examples of how we take the “objective” world and make it subjective. Each constellation is an interpretation based on a collection of stars which evokes myth or folklore or the natural world. Stories can be imputed to constellations. 

When I am in a strange city but look up at the sky and see Orion the hunter pulling back on his bow, I actually feel comforted. I believe this room is primarily meant for children who come to this exhibit, and I think children are the ones who might appreciate Miró the most. I think children can get Miró faster, without analysis. They can involuntarily laugh at what he is doing, recognize what he is saying about the world and ourselves. This is, in fact, a very child-friendly show and I was happy to see groups of school children wandering around the museum enjoying themselves.

The point of the show is that the most ordinary objects can become astonishing through the process of introspection, re-interpretation and artistic creation. We are invited to see the ordinary in new and richer ways after seeing the show. We are invited to make the ordinary meaningful to our own journeys, to invite the ordinary to become, symbolically, something lavish for us. 

The bizarre images and relationships between images are what happens when creative energy engages with an outside world possessing a humility and magical quality that allows itself to change to meet our spiritual needs to record our development as beings capable of wondrous things such as kindness, concern and mercy.

The show illustrates what Miró called the “magical qualities of the mark.” The images in Miró’s paintings are intermediaries between objective reality and dead ideograms. They stop short of a formal language, because they are alive through our engagement with them, like a biological symbiosis. The images are felt as presences are felt, thus they inspire hope, desire and fear. Indeed, every artist is affected by the world around him and if one is living in a “monstrous” age, engagement with art will elicit the appropriate response to monsters.

Yet, even though Miró lived in Franco’s Spain, a monstrous and threatening world to him, his form of expression was a type that freed his spirit and encouraged others to feel a sense of hope for an inevitable and humane change of circumstances. Miró’s work sustained the human spirit in very dark periods of time, from the Spanish Civil War, through World War II, through Franco’s tyranny. 

This wonderful show of his wonderful work at the Hong Kong Museum of Art shows that Miró’s visual sources may have been simple, but he had a sorcerer’s ability to turn the little recognized or uninteresting in our lives into a golden source of magical engagement.

Kirk Hayes at Sean Horton Gallery, New York

 

Trompe-l'œil (sounds like: trump loy) is when an artist creates a super-realistic illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, so that when you look at the painting your eyes are fooled into thinking there are literal objects there. In his current show, Droll’s Lament, Kirk Hayes’ ironic use of trompe-l'œil is a brilliant innovation that has drawn the most attention from critics to his work, even if they have failed to fully explain why Hayes might be doing this. He will first make a collage or assemblage of colored paper and other items, weather it to get a worn out or damaged look for the emotional effect he desires, and he then perfectly depicts the collage as a painting, revealing, instead of hiding, traces of the original collage.

So he perfectly represents the collage he made, showing the seams, textures and three dimensional elements as trompe-l'œil. He does not use the collage as a basic model for a painting, he creates the collage so he can literally paint the collage in minute detail. Folks are often fooled into thinking they are actually looking at a collage or assemblage of colored paper and other doodads and are stunned to find that the wood or plastic or string or any other material depicted is mere paint.

Of course, we want to say, “Wait a minute. You’re not supposed to do that! You are supposed to hide the collage elements, not make them more noticeable by painting them. Why not just display the collage?” Hayes, by the way, destroys the original collage once he paints it. Art critic Ken Johnson guessed in a New York Times review that Hayes was making a sly comment “…on modern arts love of the raw and naïve.” It may be a little more complex than this, however.

There are times when an artist wants you to keenly realize that you are looking at art, something he/she made and how it was made. Sometimes the artist wants traces of his/her work to be seen. So Hayes paradoxically uses a realistic painting technique to fully reveal something he fabricated. Trompe-l'œil is supposed to give the illusion of reality, and Hayes uses it to give the illusion of reality to a collage. In the theater Brecht, for example, created the concept of “epic” theater because he believed that traditional, realistic “bourgeois” theater lulled an audience to sleep and apathy and he wanted jarring and obviously contrived elements of his productions to wake people up to interpret and feel more deeply. He wished to reveal the ploys of theater to his audience to show both the possibilities and limits of art and to keep them mentally active through a production. 

Perhaps Hayes wants you to see how he cut, handled, weathered and positioned the paper in his assemblages because you may be able to better discern or at least be tempted to guess the inner state he was in when he did this. This is the principle of “action painting” which Pollock used so successfully. The focus shifts from the image to the psychology of the artist creating the image. Hayes is going to great pains to paint the way he created and/or presented the imagery in his work. How the artist creates his art often reveals more about what is being conveyed than looking at the figures and constructing our little narratives about the piece.

I would argue that Hayes is trying to get closer to revealing his inner state by amplifying the collage making technique through his trompe-l'œil painting. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that every material has its own language and every technique, perhaps, has its own language. To me Hayes is painting the language of collage, what collage can better reveal about the conflicts and struggles that an artist might be going through so that we viewers who are also struggling can derive some meaning and solace from this. There are reasons why an artist wants to resort to the language of collage, and Hayes is amplifying our focus on this.

Deriving meaning from Hayes work might depend heavily on examining how he created and structured his work, since many of the paintings seem very idiosyncratic and might defy any narratives we might try to create to “understand” them in a traditional manner. Some are more understandable than others. In Ephemeral we see a brief moment when a butterfly is extracting nectar from a daisy. Both have endured extremely adverse conditions as the flower is slightly burnt here and there while the butterfly is covered with band aids. A common theme in many of the paintings seems to be the capacity that exists to continue living and striving even while we are severely battered and harmed. Much of our work that has to be done in the world cannot wait for us to be fully healed; we have to go out there and engage others while suffering and even while feeling emotions due to our past suffering. Deep down inside, perhaps, we hope the healing will be quicker if we keep working instead of licking our wounds.

In some of the paintings we see an unexpected soft or gentle tenacity. In the painting Accepting Fragility we see the arms of a severely bruised person offering a butterfly tied to a folded pillow to someone. The arms recalled for me the arms of an elderly man I had once talked to at a hospital who had had so many blood tests taken on his aged, wrinkled and weakened arms that both of his arms were covered with bruises as if he had endured several beatings. The gentleness of the gesture of offering belies the pain, or perhaps derives from the pain of the person presenting the gift. The gift seems to represent the capacity to suffer without bitterness or malice, to offer joy in spite of pain.

Some paintings defy, at least for me, easy narrative explanations: the Fall of the Dildo King, for example. In this painting we see a crown with four dildos protruding from it, slender plants protruding from the dildos above a brick wall. Symbolically, the penis can represent desire, especially spiritual desire for a type of spiritual fulfilment. To me, this enigmatic painting shows a mystical process of spiritual life emerging from imitative, artificial circumstances. (Hey, give me credit for trying!)

Then there is Response to a Resharpened Fasces. The term fascist, of course, comes from the word fasces. Fasces refers to the bundle of sticks that are more difficult to break united than separated and which were traditionally placed around a pike axe in ancient Rome. A pile of feces is on the fasces. Knives have been stuck into the feces, so maybe we have a type of pun where the feces and the fasces have both been resharpened. Fascism seems alive and well in parts of the world and even, perhaps, threatens our country. But the response to fascism, represented by a pile of feces placed on the fasces, has also become more prominent and we have to wonder whether this will be enough to stop a retrograde political trend. I am guessing that the knives stuck into the feces could also just represent extra aggression against the re-emerging fasces.    

The cuts and bruises in these paintings can represent the lingering effects of guilt, shame, a sense of failure, disappointment or regret for actions which cannot be undone and for which one may always feel remorse. They could represent the continuous stabs of pain that we endure due the callousness and heartlessness of others, which might engender heartlessness in us to compound our own suffering, unless we fight against this process. Hayes paintings for me evoke the New Testament story of the crippled man at the pool of Bethesda who, for 39 years, endured intense pain persisting in his belief that healing was somehow possible, until it finally occurred.

Eat the Sun, paintings by Kysa Johnson at Morgan Lehman Art Gallery in Manhattan

 

Subatomic particle decay patterns are so provocative as a symbolic language in the work of Kysa Johnson because nobody can understand or explain why this decay happens. Scientists can only say that certain particles are “likely” to change into other particles. Certain types of elements will lose protons and neutrons and become something else or some particles, like the tau particle, will just change into one of three other particles.

So “decay” is not really what is going on here. By using the term decay scientists show the limitations of language when it comes to even physical phenomena. In fact, what often happens in subatomic particle decay is that a greater level of permanence occurs. So the term decay is being used as a marker or signifier because there is no precise term for this process. If a person wanted to be a smart-aleck, he/she could say: subatomic decay is not really decay but the use of decay as a flawed metaphor for a process we really do not understand, but which we can trace.

Thus scientists use the expression “likely” in regard to particle decay. It is “likely” that some particles will change into other particles. For Johnson the patterns created through this type of decay become a symbolic language. Subatomic decay is something that happens spontaneously. We, however, like having a cause that produces an effect. We do not quite get spontaneous change. Our entire system of science is predicated on predictable relationships. This is not predictable, it is likely, for whatever reason. So the patterns we can observe become components of a type of curlicue script or diagram for Johnson. We can scrutinize the pathways of these elegant and swirling patterns, understand the script, while hoping for clues to the origin of the unpredictable change creating the elegant scrawl. Johnson uses a language that always asks questions.

But the patterns do not point back to the origin of the change just as the shape, content and movement of objects in the universe tell us nothing about its ultimate origin. So the patterns in Johnson’s work also become markers for the unknowable, while illustrating a path to permanence and stability. It is a language always pointing back to the fact that science does not explain everything we would like it to explain. At a subatomic level, science breaks down completely and resorts to probability. When the scientist Emil Dubois-Reymond was asked how something could come from nothing or how something could have always been, his answer was “Ignoramus et ignorabimus”. We do not know and we shall never know.

So Johnson begins with a symbolic language born of the inexplicable but promising permanence. A language that points at the limits of language itself and what we wish we could grasp beyond language but never will. This hearkens back to when mystics like Giordano Bruno sought to understand the inexplicable in nature but were pushed aside by folks like Galileo who realized that mathematics and description itself could yield enough to create a useable science. But there is still something we may not grasp about nature and may never grasp and these patterns point to this. Indeed, if we ever do learn what came before the Big Bang, it will come from a monk in a cave before in comes from someone with a telescope.  

Johnson’s colorful, fluent and spindly imagery derives from the patterns, like an emergent quality, and suggests the hope for nascent or burgeoning qualities within our minds due to our proclivity to creative mysticism. These patterns are highly suggestive of other things. In the past, for example, Johnson used these decay patterns to depict galaxies. Here she creates a number of floral designs. It is as if the patterns, like branches in the spring, have allowed for the emergence of this effusive flora. She uses the patterns of the incomprehensible but permanent as a base for the ephemeral. Yet, the ephemerality of flowers ultimately takes on the mantle of permanence through artistic expression.  

Johnson calls this show: Eat the Sun, referencing the process of photosynthesis. The existence of the sun allowed for a process to be developed on Earth whereby the energy of a star could be used creatively by organisms to manufacture sugars as basic nutrients for life. Decay patterns suggested, for Johnson, stems, leaves and flowers, the structures of the organisms which evolved to derive benefit from the sun.

The patterns are a language showing a permanence which becomes the basis for images of what we consider the ultimate in ephemera, but ephemera which have created a cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, rejuvenation and evolution. They represent a transitory existence of extreme brilliance and beauty due to the departure from the stable, permanent and predictable.  

Sakuho's Air Pollution Tokyo

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If you ask random folks in Tokyo about the air quality, they will generally say that the air is pretty good...now. Tokyo went through years of severe air pollution after World War II during its redevelopment. 

But the current levels of quantifiable pollutants in the air is not the point of this series of paintings called Air Pollution Tokyo. 

Sakuho is a Japanese artist who wants to focus on our relationship with nature as a way to attain sustainability, questioning the current definition of sustainability which is based on controlling emissions and filtering out chemicals from industrial processes.

Even before the current worldwide heatwave of 2022, the Japanese artist Sakuho made these striking paintings based on the legacy of pollution in the city of Tokyo. 

The message seemed to be what we should all be getting from this current and deadly heatwave - despite the amount of filtering of harmful chemicals, the amount of reducing harmful emissions, and the positive-sounding numbers that governments seem ready to supply to their people about how clean the air is: 1) we have not significantly changed our behavior toward the environment and 2) no city on Earth can avoid the aftereffects of decades of irresponsible behavior toward the environment.

The world now feels the bounce-back of the excess, greed and arrogance shown by previous generations and societies. But we cannot blithely play the blame game as those of us in urban areas, currently, are acting in the same manner. 

Our self-righteousness seems to derive from having more effective filters now to remove certain chemicals from industrial processes, possible plans for biomass to replace coal as well as other projects allegedly aimed at a sense of sustainability. Sakuho’s art suggests that we are not asking deeper questions about economic processes and the ravaging and wasteful consumerism which has been portrayed as the only possible choice for human social development. 

This led to unchecked industrial processes creating a vicious cycle involving population increase, over-production, hyper commercialism and pollution of the air and water. The pervading and intense violence implied in her work is the violence we have projected onto the Earth, from our wants and desires, and that we do not intend to stop. 

We are in a situation where we have chosen to continue to exploit the planet, but in a safe way to humanity. This is what all of our filtering, sustainability and biomass plans seem to amount to.

The paintings of Sakuho show we have failed to realize that ethics does not just apply to overt behavior between individuals. It also applies to how we live our lives in general, our relationship to the environment and the ability to curb our desires and greed and need for excessive comfort and gain in order to establish a truer sense of sustainability. 

The paintings serve the purpose of pinpointing the pollution problem back within the individual and to social and economic forces. As economic classes have exploited individuals, they have also exploited the planet. Yet, the common person was drawn into complicity. The production processes of industrialized capitalism had a negative effect on the environment. 

But, starting in the 1950s, we see carbon dioxide emissions soar to bizarre heights due to the automobile and the desire of everyone, of every social class, to move about more conveniently. American urban public transportation systems were dismantled to encourage car buying.

Sakuho’s pieces imply we have failed to unify our ethical beliefs, desires and goals to encompass both humanity and nature. Nature is the object of our desire and we have refused to consider that we can and should show restraint in regard to our consumption and lifestyles. Looking for an analogy, we are like a person dying of lung cancer who is proud of how he finally switched to filtered cigarettes.

Sakuho’s Tokyo paintings show a miasma of excessive heat in orange and red hues, a non-dissipating heat and a self-sustaining and massive feverishness that engulfs a city. We see these colors every day on the news in the wildfires in California and Europe. 

The imagery made me also think of iconic images of violence and responses to violence. Some of the imagery reminded me of 9/11, especially the crossed steel beams which were found among debris while a massive fire burned under the World Trade Center. The steel beams also reminded me of the anti-tank obstacles established by Ukrainians outside of Kyiv during the recent invasion by Russia. 

This might not have been the original intention of the artist, but I think these images of overt violence mesh nicely with the silent, unrecognized and denied violence caused by a collective of needs and desires created and met through world corporations. 

The term structural violence was created by a sociologist to indicate that your social and economic environment can cause real, physical harm to you. For example, life expectancy for poor folks is almost always lower than for the more affluent. What do we call this violence that we have inadvertently directed at nature? In lieu of a name, we can see it represented in Sakuho’s paintings.

Indeed, in correspondence with Sakuho, she mentioned that these paintings can be thought to be about the human ego, obsession, fear and the abandonment of the individual. To Sakuho, the perception that we are safe is due to the human ego. It is the sense of denial that has hindered effective action toward changing both the environment and ourselves. 

We refuse to believe there might be anything wrong with our lifestyles – we will not change for the good of the Earth. 

When I pointed out that most folks in Tokyo might say that they are happy with the air quality, after a bleak history where Tokyo, at times, was dangerously polluted, Sakuho asked whether we can honestly say that we live with no burden on the environment, and asserted that there is no valid “numerical” or quantitative defense while we still use pesticides, spew exhaust fumes, and use massive amounts of cleaning agents and detergents, among other pollutants.

The dream for cities would seem to be to, theoretically, have a population of 10s of millions of people, but, through the cutting of emissions, to make it “sustainable” within nature. This seems the major working model out there, right now: Our lifestyle stays the same, there is nothing wrong with it, we just need more filters, alternative fuels or other ways to turn turbines that generate electricity. 

The current crisis, in which we saw London reach 40C for the first time in its history, would seem to show we are not even working fast enough to address what has been wrought before us. 

Sakuho’s work seems to invite a new definition of sustainability: Sustainability is the absence of the unbridled greed and arrogance that has been driving the process of production and a lifestyle based on excessive consumption and self-satisfaction. This type of sustainability would be the most effective way to save our environment.