A Jungle of Signs, at Feature (Sunday, May 9, 2010)

From Feature Gallery's website (linked above):

A talk by Professor Michael Taussig (Dept. of Anthropology, Columbia University) who is one of the most innovative, distinguished and socially engaged voices in cultural anthropology. An interdisciplinary thinker and engaging writer, Taussig's work combines aspects of ethnography, story-telling, and social theory. An area of long standing interest, Taussig will be discussing aspects of Latin American ayahuasca-based shamanism and its historical interface with Western magic.

In 2007, visual artists Jesse Bransford and Karsten Krejcarek spent time in the city of Iquitos, Peru and the surrounding jungle. In a public conversation they hope to further elaborate on the experiences in relation to their art and art making in general. Topics will include globalization, adventure narratives, monkeys and telepathy.

***

Bransford and Krecjarek went first, describing their embodied experience of the jungle through the filter of ayahuasca, with a vibrant slide show behind them illuminating their trip and resulting exhibition of Bransford's work in the gallery. After them, Taussig, whose book What Color is the Sacred constitutes, for me, one of the first written accounts of pure visual experience, did not disappoint. He lectured for one hour straight, responding to the two artists' points with barely a reference to notes. He also played recordings of Amazonian rituals, amplifying and vivifying their accounts with his own. The experience as a whole embraced multi-valent, experiential intelligence that broadens rather than contracts horizons. My people!

Bransford mentioned Latin American modernism as possessing qualities that relate to his experiences in Peru, but did not link its purely visual language with unfiltered, drug-induced experience. When I mentioned this to his friend in the audience, he noted the colonial aspect of modernism under discussion problematized such notions. Taussig offered a way out, stating that images diagnose a situation and by visualizing it, change it.

When I think of multiple identities, experienced in the above travels as well as daily life, I do not see how pictorial logic can remain coherent and remain visually relevant to experience. Yesterday's talk confirmed this. "The magic of otherness" might lure, initially, but once dispelled in a direct encounter, complicates and expands comprehension, perceptually and conceptually. It may become part of us, and us a part of it, but what this actually looks like cannot already have been imagined.

Brooklyn

I am here.
Outside my window, the tree is now bending with the wind and is a dry, but very deep green.

Multiplicity

On her website (linked above), Toronto-based Narrative Therapist Bonnie Miller writes,

"I love Calvin and Hobbes, and was sad when Bill Waterson, its creator, closed shop. He did it to pursue his other identity as a 'real' artist. I guess that, like many of us, Bill felt that he had only the time or energy to express one identity at a time.
...the assumption seems to be that the self is fixed, singular, and internal.

...There is another set of ideas about identity, floating around out there, that suggest these assumptions:

* that we each have many identities
* that these identities are 'performed' or played out, under different circumstances
* and that these identities are shaped and received by our social surroundings- the setting, the people in the setting, the expectations of those people, and how we react to those expectations."


In painting, diverse paint applications and collage-like composition become essential to envision space in visually convincing ways. Taking cues from traditional Chinese landscape, collage compositions jettison binary structures such as horizon lines or figure and ground. The dis- or re-integration of form, color and space that results imparts the psychological and visual effects of globalization and digitization.

Collage-like space emerges in 1960s Pop Art, reflecting then-current innovative technologies in science, space travel and foreign relations. Artists James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, in particular, fractured space by merging diverse elements--Rosenquist, through the vehicle of sign painting, Rauschenberg, through chance. Both men studied Asian philosophy and inserted its teachings within the cacophony of images they experienced as culture.

Does geographic location dictates aesthetics, like perceptions defines the self? Immersion into a new space overwhelms and inundates--but does it eradicate aesthetic origins? The doubled state of being that results between an old and new self-in-situ can be bridged by diverse elements in painting. The end-game first postulated in postmodern recycling finds new possibilities in the unknown reconfiguring of the familiar.

James Rosenquist, Painting Below Zero, p. 290

Frank Stella aid something interesting about the split-second nature of art. He said that the baseball player Ted Williams was the quintessential modern artist because of his fast eye--Williams claimed he could see the seams no a baseball as it came over the plate at ninety miles an hour. I want that instant punch when you look at one of my paintings, too--the immediacy of an ad or a billboard--but at the same time I want you to be able to read things in my paintings as they slowly rise to the surface. I'm often impressed by seeing something obliquely. That way I won't get tangled up with its meaning to the point that I forget the very thing that originally enticed me. I'll take it in in that initial flashing way, and then I'll take the time to look deeper.

What I think Frank meant is that seeing a painting is sometimes like love at first sight, something that doesn't have any barriers to it. With some paintings, you don't need words--or titles, either. You get it without anything intervening between you and your vision of it. Afterword, after you've absorbed that first visual blitz, you realize that there's something deep in that black area that you hadn't seen right away.

Guilin

Guilin’s landscape is a phantasm of mountains misshapen through lost layers of bedrock, surrounding the Li River in a Seussian panorama. Cross-pollinating Guilin’s terrain with the wide-mouthed pipes, crosses and ladders of Brooklyn's rooftops, I feel sure the collision of exaggerated naturalism and human-scaled geometry will yield a living, breathing landscape in the spirit of Yuan Dynasty scrolls.

Walkabout

A view of Walkabout: Stadium on the left, Field Notes on the right.

Field Notes is an eight-panel painting in the dimensions of Huang Gongwang's 1347-50 scroll Dwelling in the Fu'ch'un Mountains. I schematized his composition in flourescent blocks of color, projected images from the scroll in segments on the canvas and added sketchbook drawings of the Fountainhead residency, Miami, where I was working when I began the painting. To this compendium of images, I added sketches from traveling I-95 between Tampa and Miami, a Tampa convenience store, and paint itself in order to collapse color, form and gesture.

Field Notes refers to Michael Taussig's book What Color is the Sacred? and Fred R. Myers' Painting Culture. Both use the example of the anthropologist as artist, which I adapt to my practice as a painter. Taussig speaks eloquently of how color becomes all encompassing, a force that intoxicates the eye and heart. I consider this in relation to painting formless sensations that occur in the immersion of travel. It also relates to the formlessness of non-ego. I aim for such formlessness when I am painting to more accurately convey perceptions unbridled by habit. This happens naturally in new situations and places.

So the metaphor of anthropologist as artist seems apt for transcribing the world experientially. Combining "found" landscapes such as Gongwang's scrolls, my sketches, photojournalism, etc. pictorial space becomes a version of wallpaper--a repeating pattern with sudden ruptures of heightened perception. In graduate school, I remember developing large scale, unstretched canvases with "holes' in them through which new spaces emerged. They felt and looked too raw at the time, but with hindsight, perhaps the first harbingers for work I am making now.

March 13, 2010, Dorsch Gallery

Want to see these together

Walkabout

Ocketopia

Stadium, 2010

Going into the 13th hour. Space heater on. DJ Shadow on Pandora. Paint flows like water. Color spreads across the room.

Thoughts on Walkabout

The above link takes you to today's Times article on recently deceased Chinese Prof Xie Zhiliu's preparatory studies and copies, which his daughter donated to the Met in 2005. Curator and Scholar Maxwell Hearn thinks the exhibition, which reveals Xie's commitment to copying Song Dynasty masters, will change Chinese scholarship, but as far as I know, copying was the mode of learning traditional techniques in China from time immemorial. Perhaps now given Westernization this does not apply, but copying was always done in Chinese tradition.

Somehow the article unlocks my preparation for the Dorsch exhibition Walkabout. I have been mulling the concept of Walkabout for some time, related to the concept of moving through a Chinese scroll as applied to my own travels, including the Fountainhead residency I am on now. Walkabout becomes a process of experiencing a new place and making work about that. The spiritual implication of movement, initiated in painting with explosive pours and subsequent travel through the (global) landscape, supplant walking the land with moving at speed from one place to another. Movement speaks to disolocation, query-leading to the loss of ego so crucial to the requisite emptiness that painting demands.

Within the permeable landscape one finds structures and places to rest--like the rock formations in Australia or the Scholars Houses in Chinese scrolls. My interest in the shape and metaphor of Parasol House, a rounded geometric structure (tower, awning, pavilion)--turned out to be the umbrella held over Buddha, which I discovered in MogaoKu (Dunhuang Caves) last year. Parasol is the ultimate provisional shelter, a halo turned flat; a hub of connection.

All I have known going into this Walkabout is that the Chinese plum blossom idiom is the visual foundation. In Miami, I have reconciled its shape with the old, gnarled seagrape trees that line Morningside Park's waterfront. Yet, I have wondered how to integrate this concept into a larger panorama, when stuck in the image-base of "tree."

Xie Zhiliu's drawings re-opened a dialogue of space that moves from depth to flatness--simultaneously page and landscape proper. Suddenly image becomes mark, unburdened from invention. I cherish Chinese mix-and-match, from clothing to calligraphy to landscape to faith. It frees me from invention to introduce gestures, colors and sketchbook images without an organizing narrative. Form is a signifier--not mine to empty--yet, without the burden of invention, it becomes spacious, inviting.

So today I foray into material, color and mark--not unlike the way I used to draw secret images inside the wallpaper of my childhood room--compressing space into layered non-narratives that are "seen at a glimpse" and made as a doodle.

Walkabout

From Wickipedia (linked above):
Walkabout refers to a rite of passage where male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months.[1] In this practice they would trace the paths, or "songlines", that their people's ceremonials ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds. Merriam-Webster, however, defines the noun as a 1908 coinage that refers primarily to "a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work", with the only mention of "spiritual journey" coming in a usage example from a latter-day travel writer.[2]

Landscape

In the California Light and Space show that just closed at Zwirner, Peter Alexander's cast fiberglass wedge took me by surprise. Standing in front of it, the Pacific Ocean materialized right before my eyes: once again, I lived in LA, the light, the space of the ocean directly ahead.

The Alexander puzzles me. Its sensory capacity is overwhelming, similar to how Michael Taussig discusses anthropoligist Malinowski's perception of color in his book, Is Color Sacred? --yet, as an object, the wedge functioned similarly to a snowglobe. Once I found the illusion inside, would I be able to recover the initial moment of spontaneous perception?

As a painter in the age of sensory overload, I wonder about the emotional heat in illusion. I understand the need for distance; if imagery is proximate, readable; will it provide space for an object to be considered reflectively beyond the sensate? Even as I ask the question, I recognize its inherent Modernist foundation.

Gober's Charles Burchfield catalogue and the ancient Chinese painters' integration of spiritual, emotional and perceptual navigate the slippery terrain of temperature. As I write, waiting for pours of paint to dry on the first few panels of an epic landscape, my mind turns to my current location, Miami, and ways to express its impact in paint.

I begin to see my heritage as an American landscape painter, visionary division. Visionary sidesteps the binaries and gets to the core of immediacy.

Morningside Park, Miami, Friday morning

Nocturne

Painting

Paint is embodied. That is part of its importance.

Xio Yau and Wei Baogong

Wei took the picture of Xiao and I in the post below this. Xiao's son, whom I got to know well, is called "humanity" in Chinese. I could not understand the word, sadly...and so called him wo de xiao peigno (pidgin is off)-- my little friend.

They live in the village next to mine in Songzhuang, as they have for 9 years. Wei paints, Xiao is a mastermind organizer and coordinator. Formerly a soldier in the army, she met Wei and now lives the art life--facilitating, translating, planning, orchestrating.

We met in 2005 at Red Gate. Xiao arranged for Wei and a friend to take me to the Great Wall on a freezing December day. They picked me up early; we ate dried grape fruit on the way. Delicious. The three guys wore green Mao coats with fur lining that were very warm. Once we reached our destination, about two hours north of Beijing, we crossed a footbridge and paid a few yuan to a local family before heading to an old, crumbling part of the wall. We were the only ones on it that day. Mountains rose and fell around us; shadows moved across them as the sun shifted over the sky. After several hours of hiking, we returned to the family's home, where they made us a warm meal. A photograph of Mao was on the table.

Afterward Wei, his friend and Xiao drove me to a Buddhist temple, with expansive grounds. They told me to go in alone. I entered a passage lined with bamboo. Moving over the grounds, I saw enormous Buddhas, an 8,000 year old tree spread over a lattice and another extremely high mountain with a criss-crossing path. I sighed. How could I not climb it, though my feet were frozen solid and my legs sore from the Wall? And as I climbed, and climbed, I reached the top, where Beijing spread out before me, a flat field illuminated by a gold sun in the distance. As I descended the second major climb that day, I heard bamboo soughing in the wind. The van with Xiao, Wei and their friend idled in the parking lot outside.

I was transformed. I had seen scrolls from my own perspective, the journey they represent over a duration of time and moving through a place.

Wei loves Yuan Dynasty painters and has a copy of Huang Gongwang's landscape book. He is a classic Buddhist Chinese scholar, adept at painting, calligraphy and also serving tea. Four years later after the Great Wall, when the picture below was taken, he was sharing his books on the great Chinese painters. Later, we shared philosophers--he did not know Francois Chen, but told me about Red Pine and others working in the United States. I continue to learn a lot from Wei Baogong and Xiao Yau.

My friends