On Untitled (With Hand) and the Limits of Interpretation

I haven’t written a blog yet about a particular work of art—no hidden agenda, just a response to something that I like, something that I find evocative. This Louise Bourgeois sculpture has haunted me for a long time. I have never seen it in the flesh—I expect that if I did I would be disappointed. In fact it is very hard to find on the web—it is apparently not a very popular piece. So the work itself is pathetic and is having trouble finding an audience—for a sometime sad-sack like me, what’s not to like about that! But, I am jumping the gun here. I am interpreting, judging before I am even out of the gate. Let’s try to back up a bit.

We have a perfect sphere in white marble resting on a rough bed of the same material. A baby doll’s arm sticks out of the sphere. It is perhaps intended to look like a real baby’s arm but in all the reproductions that I have seen of this piece (2-3??) it looks more like that of a plastic baby doll. The arm points down awkwardly, neither reaching nor resting, just hanging there, unable to release. Sphere and arm together are a classic case of surrealist juxtaposition where where two or more disparate objects are placed next to or on top of each other. The frisson created by these juxtapositions is supposed to stimulate our imaginations, shifting us to the road to the absolute that Andre Breton and company were so fond of. And that is one possible outcome here—certainly the sculpture is disorienting. And it is also (as already mentioned) sad, pathetic, an image perhaps of failure, even death. But once more I feel that I have short-circuited the process, arriving at more or less final conclusions too soon, too easily. There’s much more in the middle that we might “unpack.”

A sphere is an image of perfection. Without features, it is the same all over, smooth, and event-free. And for that reason the sphere is also an image of eternity and infinity. Not for nothing did ancient man think of the universe as a sphere or series of concentric spheres. However this sphere has a single interruption—the baby’s arm—which seems not so much to have grown out of the sphere as to be appended to it (admittedly the angle of the photo, where we cannot see the join, contributes to that impression; how might our impression change if we saw the join?). The arm is rounded like the sphere but much more articulated even if, due to its position, it does not suggest life. And of course babies are not only about life but about new life in all its freshness. Because the arm is there by itself (which suggests dismemberment) and because it points downward (gravity brings all things down finally), our normally happy response to a baby is changed to worry, frustration or just puzzlement. We are not sure exactly what is happening here but, whatever it is, it is not good.

And yet I would have to admit that all of this writing while pretty accurate (I think) and thought-provoking (I hope) has not really explained this object. Or even the photo of this object (because that is what we’re talking about, right?). The photo and object are still out there somewhere, more or less unscathed by my commentary. And as fun as interpretation is (and I do find it fun), that’s a good and essential thing about all art. Bob Dylan has a line “With no attempts to shovel the glimpse/Into the ditch of what each one means”—and I think that’s what he’s talking about. Interpretation is a necessary part of experiencing any artwork but it is never the same as the work itself which remains always a little bit beyond us.

Telling Stories

Sometime in the past thirty years (late 80s? 90s?) it became trendy to talk about stories or, if you were in academia, about narrative.  Stories became the chosen way to convey information, to reach people, to frame your argument.  Everyone had a story to tell and many suppressed stories (culturally, historically) resurfaced.  In the highbrow novel and in painting an emphasis on storytelling returned even if these stories were often fractured in some way.  Of course the crazy thing is that stories ever disappeared (and in truth they didn’t—they never left popular culture!).  The truism that we make sense of our lives via stories is, in this case, spot on.  But for much of the 20th century in the visual arts they were suspect—an anachronism that did not fit the flat space of the painting’s surface; a literary device that contaminated the pure visuality of art.  My undergraduate art program more or less bought that line and communicated it to us even as a host of artists (Guston, Jenney, the Chicago Imagists, Kiefer) brought narrative back, along with representation in general.  Guston famously said of his rejection of abstraction that he “Got sick and tired of all that purity.  Wanted to tell stories.”  And I think the critical rise in Surrealism’s stock in the last third of the 20th century had to do with this trend because Surrealism also never really rejected narrative.  What it rejected was a rational narrative (what is a dream after all but a stranger story!).  This kind of bent narrative is what drives the work of Neo Rauch.  We know that a story is being told but, even at a glance, it is clear that the story resists easy interpretation.  We might say that the story is all middle; the beginning and the end are missing.

I got to this trend late.  I have only become interested in narrative and especially in what is called meta-narrative about five years ago.  I understand the word meta-narrative to refer to a story that embraces a range of other stories some of which may even conflict.  As in the Andrea da Firenze fresco below, such a meta-narrative is more likely to attempt to sum up an entire faith or philosophy rather than just one person’s life.  It is by nature unwieldy; an attempt to place within one framework more than it can comfortably hold.  You get that sense from this fresco, so packed with large and small elements that it fairly bursts the arch which bounds it.  That’s one of the things that I like about it (and the color!!).  I cannot pull off anything at that scale, but I have been hanging my smaller paintings together as if they were part of some Renaissance altarpiece--except that in my work there are buildings, heads, abstracts, landscapes all vying for space and attention.  It may not always work and the unity that I hope is there may sometimes elude me but, more and more, it is important to make the effort—to see all the pictures as part of one world that I have made out of the flotsam and jetsam of this one.

Andrea da Firenze Triumph of the Church c.1368 fresco

Awkward! The Uses of the Ungainly

I have been thinking a lot lately about "the awkward" in modern and post-modern art.  This use of the ungainly goes back at least to Cezanne where it is generally seen as a mark of his integrity, his refusal to make things too smooth, too pretty.  His bathers seem a deliberate affront to the entire tradition of the Western female nude.  They are neither sexy nor elegant nor even particularly voluminous.  What they are is crudely drawn and rather awkwardly posed which gives them, at their best, a kind of power like an inarticulate oath.  I admit that I have always preferred his still-lives and landscapes, and yet there is no denying that his nudes created a new template for the figure that Picasso, Matisse, and even Guston and Baselitz took advantage of.  His embrace of more primitive means was liberating to an avant-garde increasingly suspicious of the West's sophistication--its science, rationalism, progress.  Something rawer was being lost and these artists sought to reclaim it.

Because its parts do not fit together properly or completely there is almost always a potentiality that also accompanies the awkward.  The perfect is a closed loop, sufficient unto itself.  It does not reflect life as it is lived, but as we wish it was, without blemish.  The ungainly reflects life's imperfections and by that very token it can speak of change, growth.  Or it can simply vibrate with almost mystical possibility.  That is what this Bonnard does for me.  Again the drawing (of his wife Marthe) is crude--her legs like fleshy sticks, her face impossible to make out completely.  The little dog at the bottom pops, perhaps too much.  The bathtub's rim tilts and wobbles like the wall behind it.  Bonnard applies his riotous colors like a drunken mason, in large squares above and small below--in amorphous clots on the side of the tub and within.  The whole thing feels stitched together, as if it might come apart at any minute.  And that is why it shimmers like it does.  It flexes and breathes.  Bonnard increasingly seems a major influence on many contemporary painters, just as Cezanne was a hundred plus years ago, and I think it is because he is so radically imperfect and finds in that imperfection a new freshness.  Our 21st century world is a very mixed bag and we are not sure how to go forward--we are groping, often awkwardly.  I think Bonnard (and Cezanne before him) speaks to that.

Pierre Bonnard   Nude in the Bath   1941-6   oil on canvas

A Plague on Both Your Houses

There are many different ways that the art world can be divided but one certainly is between realists and the avant-garde (whatever that means these days).  The gulf between these camps is often unbridgeable; the avant-garde still tends to view realism as reactionary, and many realists respond by dismissing almost everything done after Post-Impressionism.  I have always thought this state of affairs lamentable because at their root both impulses are essential to a healthy tradition.  If I can summarize--realism is essentially the impulse to directly study the appearance of our world and render it with some degree of fidelity.  The avant-garde sees the primary source of art in the mind and embraces a radical freedom for artists to go wherever their minds beckon.  Realism holds that our visual world is the primary source for form (and ideas) and the avant-garde holds that ideas (and forms) emerge most directly from human cognition, individual and collective.  

And to that I say, yes and yes!!  What is more, these emphases can correct the narrower tendencies of both traditions.  Much realism practiced today is mindless--pretty pictures of pretty places--it needs a strong dose of intellect to say something deeper.  And much avant-garde work is solipsistic and, often, just plain boring--it needs to continually measure itself against the depth of the larger world that is out there.  Why can we not have Andrew Wyeth and Marcel Duchamp and have them talking to each other.  Until we do, the art of both camps, both houses will be unnecessarily diminished.

Andrew Wyeth  Renfield  1999