When it rains, it pours......

The Following is the introduction and first chapter of the thesis draft I wrote last semester. I will probably keep the ideas in this first section largely intact.... I may radically revise the introduction and the final part of section one in which I relate these ideas to my own process. I'm a posting machine today, what can I say?

**********

I am a painter who is fascinated by pictures which allow for the coexistence of two incongruous attributes- the impression of a living presence and evident paint. Living presence refers to the sensation of viewing a form that looks back at you; something which seems to possess its own subjecthood. Evident paint, on the other hand, is paint which is never completely submerged in illusion. It is always more or less honest about its physicality and unremarkable nature. The coexistence of the two in a single image is not impossible, but it often inspires a complicated or nuanced emotional experience for the viewer. It is also a prevalent trend in the world of contemporary painting. There is a strong precedent for it in the late paintings of Philip Guston and in the painted photographs of Gerhard Richter. My passion for the Paintings of Cecily Brown, Elizabeth Neel, and Katy Moran is likely one of the primary reasons that my own practice has engaged in this same realm of ambiguity. But now that I am involved in it and am so interested in it, I want to try to determine what this ambiguity can mean for me and how I can define it in such a way that I can own it as my own.
In this essay, I will present three different ways of conceiving of and explaining how this ambiguity effects interpretations of my paintings. I do not see the three of them as different points in the same argument, but instead as potential points of departure that have cumulatively influenced the trajectory of my studio process. I chose them because they reflect one of the other lasting aspects of my studio process: a love for and fascination with the animal. I have found that through the course of this research, the animal and the ambiguity in my artwork are closely linked together.

**********

1. Consciousness is Hesitation

The first means of understanding the tension in my paintings sprang from a close reading of the philosopher Henri Bergson’s seminal work Creative Evolution. In it, Bergson attempts to reconsider the relationship between the natural sciences and philosophy from the ground up. Creative Evolution is rooted in a belief that life is a “current of creative energy”. It is a zone of continual play, motivated not by efficiency alone but also by the incorporation of chance and irrationality (62). Bergson notes this when he writes, “Nature is more and better than a plan in the course of realization. A plan is a term assigned to labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the portals remain wide open” (Pearson 67). Life does more than just sustain itself within a predetermined set of conditions-- life bubbles over its container. It not only sustains itself, but exceeds the parameters placed around it.

This is how Bergson makes sense of the animal in relation to the plant. The animal and plant are both alive, obviously, but they respond to slightly different environmental constraints. The plant needs to sustain itself by somehow developing a process in which its immediate environment can provide it with everything it needs. The plant uses the nutrients and energy of the sun, soil, and air to equalize the energy it uses with the energy it is provided with. The animal, however, is life’s answer to a slightly more complicated question: Can something be alive and have to seek out its own food source? For Bergson, every type of animal has to answer to this “seeking out”, this need to move, in its own way. Over time the animal has developed limbs, muscles and a central nervous system in order to better coordinate and propel itself through space (Bergson 155). Animal scientist and author Temple Grandin discusses exactly this difference in her book Animals In Translation. To illustrate her point, Grandin describes an animal called a sea squirt, an organism which starts out its life as a tiny mobile animal with a cluster of only 300 or so brain cells (Grandin 121). It spends the first phase of its life searching for the perfect spot to plant itself. The sea squirt then roots there permanently, turning from an animal into a plant and actually eating its own brain and tail muscles in the process (Grandin 121). The animal is intimately related to the plant. What differences there are between them are a function of the animal’s need for speed.

The Sea Squirt

We can follow the implications of this difference between plant and animal one step further. Consciousness, according to Bergson, has also developed as a function of the animal’s need for mobility. In other words, the same force which gave rise to opposable thumbs is behind the tools of consciousness which we use to perceive and manage our world. The conscious animal’s horizon has broadened exponentially: it can retain memories, it can build mental pictures to help it manipulate or predict its environment, and it can weigh these different pictures against one another in order to come to more informed decisions on how to act. Pearson writes that, “With the human animal the life of consciousness reaches its highest state of emancipation from the restricted movement of matter” (68). In the conscious animal, then, life is best characterized as a more or less consistent hesitation between realms of sensory input and mental projection as much as it is a navigation of physical environments.

It may prove productive to reach out with this idea of conscious life as hesitation to other less expected places. Take this statement by the painter Leon Golub, speaking more than twenty five years ago:

The very fact that the ads and the nightly news and all those things were on together bombarding people in their homes made it all the more horrific. All this atomized chaos, all the controlled and uncontrolled verbal and imagistic garbage jitters in the skulls of the onlookers even as it jitters in the skulls of the media manipulators. We’re up against simultaneous bombardments from a range of media sources.
(Newman 6)

What is of interest to me here is Golub’s choice of the word “jitteriness” to describe the way he feels watching TV. What he describes is a change in the pace of media to the point where individual images and stories are no longer consciously separated, but flow together in one stream of information. It is a shift from something which requires part of one’s attention to something which requires all of one’s attention. Not only is conscious life hesitation, but the way that life is represented in the modern media landscape can be described along exactly the same lines. Both Bergson’s hesitating life and Golub’s jittering media do the same thing-- the jitteriness of both result from the subject’s attempt to turn this scattered array of information into a coherent sense of identity and world. There are other ways of representing the subject which relate to this kind of unceasing movement. In his discussion of the early daguerreotype, Jalal Toufic offers a new way of conceiving this represented life in terms of hesitation. He writes,

The first thing that one notices in many nineteenth century photographs is the blurriness of the living. Since the early daguerreotypes and calotypes required long, multi minute exposures, at first photography best preserved the dead, not the living, the quick (quick. 6. Archaic a. Alive. [American Heritage Dictionary])... To belong to nature whether as an object or as a living entity is to be restless. (161)

For Toufic, blurriness is the most accurate way of picturing the living subject. It is subtle enough that it describes a cerebral or conscious movement just as much as it seems related to a direct physical action.

Jasquith, Nathanial. Mother (circa 1860) Photograph, 1/4 plate daguerreotype.

**********

The ambiguity which defines my painting practice may be attractive to me for some of the same reasons. In this case, the impression of presence and the gestural mark could harmoniously coincide through a shared connection to movement. If we follow the leads of Golub and Toufic, it may be that the most convincing representation of the subject is also the moving subject, perhaps even more so than the confirmation associated with a recognizable form. The evident paint mark can also emphasize movement through the trace of the artist hand. When he briefly discusses the artist in Creative Evolution, Bergson implies exactly this. Pearson writes, “The eye... perceives the features of the living in terms of an assembling and not as something involving mutual organization and reciprocal interpenetration... it is in Creative Evolution that Bergson poses the question: what is the time of a work of art, that is, what is the time of its creation of form?” (67). Apparent individual marks can counteract the unifying tendencies of the eye and contribute to the perceived hesitation of the whole figure. Like the rings of a tree trunk, the evident mark can act to demonstrate its own rate of growth within that of the whole. A short dash conveys a completely different type of time than a slow drip, for example, and when the two are juxtaposed together, the painted subject begins to jitter and move subtly. In this way, the movement of the individual strokes can work in concert to produce a jittering, painted subject.


tune in next week for Section 2: Umwelts