POP GOES THE WEASEL

 

A note, dated 6/21/14, I wrote in ink in the back of my copy of Hal Foster’s The First Pop Age (2012, Princeton UP) says: 

What I’m after: abstract photographs or photographs as abstract paintings. I think Richter [of the five artists Foster examines: Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha] is the most germane for my immediate idea (from oceanscape or cityscape photos) but could see the possibility of figures, portraits, ‘iconic images’ (of friends, influences, celebrities) being used the same way.

It’s been done, I know—but the interest is still in the use of fields, lines, planes for form.

Am I ready to become a pop formalist?

Today, having finished the chapter on Richter (back in 2014 I apparently stalled in the Warhol chapter), I can see that I was right. (Not surprising as I’d seen Richter’s “40 Years of Painting” exhibition at MoMA in 2002. I’m thinking that it’s possible I bought Foster’s book at MoMA’s bookstore after viewing the Sigmar Polke exhibit that ran April-August 2014. Both shows gave me much food for thought where making images is concerned.)

Foster strikes me as much more in tune with Warhol and that mechanical aspect of Pop as in thrall to the productiveness of commodity culture. Products for the sake of production rather than production for the sake of product. The very notion of “product” as somehow synonymous with “object” takes its impetus from that conflation, a conflation that, it seems, art in my lifetime (since the end of the Fifties) can do nothing to avoid, can at best exploit.

What Richter—whom Foster quotes a lot with a certain hands-thrown-up gesture—gets at, it seems to me, is the spanner that someone who actually cares about painting throws into the works. Because Warhol doesn’t care, nor does Foster, really. The conceptual force of art is all he can work up any attention to, even if it means that a dizzying level of production on Richter’s part meets with points like: “They [an entire body of “blurred” paintings in gray paint] suggest how our very sensorium, memory, and unconscious have become, at least in part, ‘photogenic,’ that is to say, not only affected by photography and film but also somehow adjusted to them—suited, even designed, to be photographed or filmed, created with such light in mind, along the lines suggested by Kracauer in 1927” (196). So that numerous paintings were created, in the mid-1960s, simply to illustrate a condition that Siegfried Kracauer was onto in the late Twenties. It’s a common feature of Foster: the thesis, uncontroversial as it might be, is supported by the art. No need to really look at it after that.

But the quotations from Richter start to steal the show. “Something has to be shown and simultaneously not shown in order perhaps to say something else again, a third thing” (196—the quotation apparently comes from Richter’s Writings, pg 272, but is not dated explicitly in Foster). “’Illusion—or rather appearance, semblance—is the theme of my life’ Richter also commented in 1989” (215 in Richter; 198, Foster). Foster tries to develop this question of “semblance” to serve his theme of the “photogenic” as an element of Richter’s painting: “semblance is not the resemblance produced in representation any more than it is the negation of this resemblance produced in abstraction. Semblance comprehends both modalities because it concerns the very consistency of appearance—it is what allows the world before us, natural or mediated, or natural as mediated, to cohere—and this concerns Richter above all else: “'Appearance,’ that is to me a phenomenon” (405).” Then Foster cites Richter “in the 1989 statement” saying “All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance,” and sums up that “according to Richter, the painter must ‘repeat’ [the semblance of the world] or, more exactly, ‘fabricate’ it” (199, Foster). It would be nice to read Richter’s entire statement but even in this cherry-picked version I like the way Richter suggests that we live in a world that is not simply already viewed through media, as Pop (in Foster’s version) belabors endlessly, but in which “appearance” or “semblance” is a condition of recognizing anything, or having, as it were, visual relations with the world and the things and people in it. His fabrication of that, as what an artist’s act amounts to, puts the burden on the viewer I suppose to determine what relation one of his paintings has to the other elements of the visual world that we recognize. Where do these fabricated semblances fit in in our universe of semblances?

To me, the fascination with what Richter achieves, as a painter, is tied up with my own burgeoning fascination with painting. I can’t say I ever had the fascination with painting as activity that sustained so many careers. I generally wanted the paint to do something I was trying to do, to strike the eye a certain way, and that’s that. The fascination of the painted was something to be found in the hands of masters, or at least in very gifted students. Nowadays I’d say I’m fascinated by the question of what I call “rendering.” And what gets rendered, to some extent, is what Richter is calling “semblance” or “appearance.” Foster insists this has nothing to do with the resemblance between the photograph and its subject and or between the painting and the photograph (the paintings by Richter being discussed all derive from photographic sources). And it’s true that “resemblance” is a lower order quality, one that Richter, as a painter, is too gifted to be bothered by. But it is, to me, a part of the concern of rendering: if I want the image to “look like” the person the picture is of, though not a stenciled version of the image. In other words, the photographic image, or the reproduction, I’m working from is indeed a semblance—of someone or something—but I want to render my relation to that semblance, which is not contained by that image nor exhausted by it, nor by my rendering of it. All the rendering does is perform that relation.

This is something Foster eventually gets to: Richter’s painting “is neither a progressive form of critical art nor a cynical kind of posthistorical pastiche. It does not resolve its contradictions so much as it performs them, and in this performance, it sometimes suspends them as well” (207). It’s not that Foster really sees painting as performance, and yet his formulation, once we get past his usual binary choices about what art can be (critical/cynical, progressive/posthistorical), almost articulates what is at work there. The art of painting as performance. What the whole “performance art” aspect of our contemporary art world [recently watched The Artist is Present] stresses is that the audience wants to be a part of the act/art. Fine. But the Old School approach was about coming to see the finished product/object—all the performance had already taken place, in the studio. Still my preference. And that’s because what happens, in the witnessing/observing/perceiving, is like what happens in reading/listening. I can’t see with another’s eyes nor hear with another’s ears nor read with another’s mind. I bring my own gear wherever I go. I want the artist to show me the semblance arrived at for the sake of my seeing. I'll take it from there. To be “in the scene”—like taking a selfie next to a masterpiece—is to underscore the historical dimension of art. You are there, it’s in your space and time. So what?

But in making art I have no such escape valve. I mean it is in my space and time because I am the one there making it. And there’s no sense of audience, only a sense of when I’m done, if only because I’m tired of “seeing what I can do.” I hit the limits of my ability or of my patience and so it’s time to move on. Otherwise, the rendering is its own agenda, to play with paint for the sake of form. What used to stymy me wasn’t just my lack of skill, but my lack of conviction that there should be something rather than nothing. Not nihilism so much as no commitment to an enduring image. The Pop culture that Foster is keen to elucidate struck me as not worth the candle. Tedious enough in each encounter, why proliferate Campbell soup cans to underscore the tedium? At the same time, there were fabricated images that fascinated—including even fully commercial products like album covers and book jackets, to say nothing of magazine ads. Meanwhile, any canvas no matter how grandly sublime could become an icon in a textbook, a thumbnail. An image, not a painting. The victory of Pop in the sense that seeing the actual “one and only” artwork could seem redundant. Though it’s really not if you really are looking/seeing and not simply conceptualizing as you wander through.

So maybe art isn’t exhausted by the tedium of making things but by the tedium of explicating, of fitting the object into the syllabus, of analyzing for the sake of an activity that, unlike art itself, seems to need no justification. If only because it has academic pedigree.

 All of which is simply a way to further render my note at the back of the book, a way of saying that I could see, in 2014, a détente with Pop, which I otherwise fault with being the a la mode from my childhood onward that seems impossible to outdistance, outlive, escape, or fully accept. And I say, as I did then, that Richter does help me see the way to that end. It’s in the performance of rendering semblance. What anyone other than me sees in that semblance? What the fuck do I care? As SD sez: “unsheath your dagger definitions.” Call it something, if it suits. As all these Pop guys know so well, it must be addressed by the critical—I won’t say “community”—apparatus (apparatchiks?) in order to really exist. But that’s just saying that any semblance one renders as an object must be given its wraithlike existence in the permanent embalming fluid of history or else . . .  we might as well, as Christopher Fry once put it, sculpt in snow.

 Yeah, but I like paint.

Paintings, City Wide Open Studios, New Haven, October 2020

The following introduces the images I’m sharing in this year’s City-Wide Open Studios in New Haven, CT (here’s a link to the site at Artspace).

1. “Now & Then: Self Portrait with Photos” (January 1983, and August/September 2020; 24" x 30")

I'm feeling more Proustian than usual, thanks to this inter-temporal slam. Back in the winter of 1983, I was 23 and worked in security at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and spent a lot of time hanging out with current and former students there, as well as a number of Philadelphia poets and artists. I painted a self-portrait that featured, on the right-hand side, my image in the bathroom mirror (the boards through the plaster showed renovation work that was halted when we moved in), and, on the left, a painting in black and white based on a photo of me in March, 1982, around the time of my daughter’s first birthday. In between were pasted three reproductions of a photo of me at 20 (my first winter in Philly) which I painted upon. The lower left showed a sunrise on the ocean when we stayed in Ocean City, MD, in June of 1981, and the upper left showed a view of Bar Harbor, ME, from Cadillac Mountain, from a visit in October the same year. The idea was to preserve me at that moment (the start of the end of the Philly era, as it turned out), set beside some images from the recent past that informed that period.

In 2020, the Kehler-Liddell Gallery in Westville put out a call for artists to contribute to a show called “I Am”: “How do you see yourself? How do others see you? What makes you, you? From selfies to personal branding to the complexities of identity politics, our carefully crafted personas are routinely broadcast to the world via the internet. The modern world revels in the revelation of a semblance of self, allowing us to conceal as much as we reveal. In this age of unprecedented exposure, how can an artist offer some fresh statement of self?” (Here’s a link to Brian Slattery’s coverage of the exhibit for the New Haven Independent.) I didn’t submit anything but the question made me think of my youthful self-portrait, which I wouldn’t have submitted as is because I was never quite satisfied with it. That got me thinking about painting-in a new, contemporary, twenty-first-century face.

Initially I thought I might use a very good photograph my wife Mary took of me for a class she was taking around 2017. But that already was a little dated. I turned 60 in 2019 and it made sense that the picture should be from the new decade in my life—the 60s!—and from the new decade we’ve begun—the Twenties! Shortly after my sixty-first birthday in August, with “Covid hair” in evidence, I took a selfie with my Surface and that’s what the new face on the left is based on. Further work was done on the “me” of 1983 as well, and the ocean (which was the part most fun to paint and which looks forward to a series of seascapes I hope to get started on soon).

While working on the painting, I played cassette tapes I still have from 1983 as well as an iTunes playlist featuring only LPs from 1980-83 that I owned at the time. Who says you can’t go home again?

In response to the K-L Gallery query: The activity of painting recalls someone I have been at various times in my life, and am trying to be again. For it’s not simply an action—painting—it’s an assertion of identity. One becomes the maker of this particular thing, and of another, and another . . . But there is no resting within that identity because it’s predicated on activity, an activity that changes with each new attempt. The task of painting what one sees becomes at once a reflection upon how perception changes day to day. There’s no enduring gaze, there are only the discrete moments of looking. Even a static image changes. And that fact, which used to defeat me and make me despair of ever “getting it right,” now keeps me in the game, given over to the effort to paint the way I see at the moment. And—here music contributes in subtle ways—the way I feel from moment to moment, or song to song. Part of the process of trial and error means relearning how to paint, or of learning how I paint now. “I Am” both painter and painted, and, in the painting, both 23 and 61.

 

2. “Baby Mommy” (September-December, 2019; 14" x 18")

 

The return to painting after a twenty-year lay-off started a year ago with this painting. The photograph shows my mother—who died in 2011 at age 82—at three or four, and so dates from around 1932. She is dressed for her portrait in a white, billowy dress adorned with embroidery across the shoulders and neckline, with puffy short sleeves and a cape, discernible off to her left side. Dress shoes—one is visible as she sits with one leg beneath her, the other foot is out of the frame. She leans forward slightly, eyes gazing at something, or simply intent upon not blinking. The face is a bit tense but also—I sense—greatly impressed at the fuss it must have taken to appear so perfect. Her hair is carefully combed, and she wears a bracelet on her right arm and a pendant around her neck. There she sits, Elaine May Taylor, third child and third daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James Patrick Taylor of Wilmington, Delaware, at her best. Understood even then, I suspect, as an icon of the ephemeral beauty of childhood.

The activity of painting involves what’s called “muscle memory”—indeed, that’s one of its great attractions, as some might feel for cooking or running or playing an instrument or any of dozens of physical activities. Which may include dancing or making love. And the latter is the act I find most akin to painting because it is a labor of love, this effort to render an image. Working from a photograph presents certain immediate frustrations—you can only see what the camera shows. And what the camera shows has been frozen in a lifelike but non-living image. To put life into it—my life—is the task, certainly. But, more importantly, the effort means putting my mother’s life into the image. Day after day I painted and watched her face change—watched as I changed her face—letting me glimpse my older brother, Tom, or Joan Walters, a cousin my age (who then died in April), or my mother’s father—recalling his resemblance to my younger brother, Jerry—or our sister Kathy, or even my daughter Kajsa, whose face I drew many times for a collage of images from photographs of her, newborn to age ten, back in the mid-90s. To find those other faces lurking in my mother’s child-face as I painted and repainted it was to see again our interrelations, while the face that emerged in the painting was not my mother as a child, or not only. The look in her eyes—in the eyes I fashioned for her—was a look I had seen, it was the stare not of the child in the photo, who would become my mother, but of my mother as I knew her. That double vision—was it only in my eyes, looking at what I had done, or was it there more tangibly? My deceased mother’s living gaze brought back to me as an object to be regarded, as a “thing” that had been, that had—in a sense—never gone away. The painting I created was not my mother as a little girl, but a little girl as my mother, a baby mommy.

3. “Not Yet Dad” (January-April, 2020; 14" x 18")

 

Here the idea was to do a quick study from a photograph of my father, Fred Earl Brown, 1927-1996. The picture was taken in a photo booth with my mother around the time, I believe, they became engaged in 1949. They married in August of that year and my dad turned 22 in October. I liked the way my father engaged the camera in this photo, ready to start his life with the woman at his side. He had been in the service as a Marine, but he was not yet a dad. Their first child would not be born until March 1952, when my father was 24. The fact that I was a dad before my 22nd birthday gave me a certain pleasurable feeling of priority over that young dude. The photo is black and white so I had considerable leeway in choosing colors, and the expectation that I would paint this one quickly soon faded away. I had thought, because my mother’s photo was such a fine studio affair, that it would be the more difficult to render, but the flash-bulb-lighting on my father was the kind of distortion that is foolish to render as is, in paint. So it took some time before I got a tonality and balance I could live with.

There’s the old canard of the poet Paul Valéry saying that, for amateurs, a poem is never finished, only abandoned. A comment I’ve often applied self-consciously, with an ironic smirk, to my own efforts. Valéry, a certain kind of perfectionist, wouldn’t undertake any work unless he knew what “the end” was, what it was he wanted to achieve and why. Well, we all can’t be Valéry, and many of us simply blunder along, trying things, eventually saying “I give up.” In fact, the only thing that made me stop work on this painting was the fact that I needed to move on, to begin the series that comprises the rest of the images in this inventory. And because any further work would only distort what I’d already achieved, and I didn’t want to find out where such distortion would take me. Not with this. The photograph, unprofessional as it is, has a charm I wanted to maintain and that has to do with walking a line between simply sentimental evocation—which I don’t at all disparage, at this point in my life, whatever I might’ve felt about such motivations as a younger man—and something more elusive. That “something” kept me involved because (whatever it is), it entails a search within myself for a reason to do anything so de trop, so superfluous, as making a thing. A photograph can be scanned, made into a digital facsimile, photoshopped, and shared. What can be the purpose of rendering that image as a separate object, if not the experience that occurs in the fashioning? And that’s the very thing—my skepticism says—not likely to be present to other eyes or at least not as a particular experience. The question of particularity—this particular image at this particular time—is apt to be meaningless to anyone but me. Even my siblings or my father’s grandchildren, familiar or not with this image of his youth, aren’t likely to relive their relation to him simply because I made this painting. And yet something like that is my goal: to live the hours spent making the image as a kind of homage—to my father’s past, to the beam in his eye, and to my past indebted to him and to whatever aspect of our connection still lives. While painting “Baby Mommy” I thought of my father once saying—watching me paint as a teenager still living at home—“I’m gonna have to chain you to the easel.” He meant, quite rightly, that I was very lazy about painting, even back then when I was doing Frank Frazetta copies for spending money, and I wasted a lot of time not making any effort and a lot of effort not putting in the time. So, on this one, I put in a lot of time.

 

The Tarot Panels

This is not the place to go into the history of my interest in the 22 cards called the “Major Arcana” in the Tarot deck. Suffice to say the curiosity dates from around 1980 and that I wrote a poem for each of the 22 cards between 1988 and 1992, which I gave a public reading of while in grad school at Princeton. A few efforts to publish them as a chapbook went nowhere and my interest drifted to other things. When I moved to Hamden in 2016, I hoped the extra room would give me a place to paint and one of the ideas was to do an “illustrated Arcana” in some fashion. When the COVID lockdown occurred in March, I got immersed in texts and notes to see how I’d approach that. Developing a logic I’ll maybe go into on some other post, I broke up the 22 cards into four groups of five, with two leftover, one as transition and the other as outcome. The four groups were titled—following on ideas about literary interpretation I spent some post-doc years developing—“Ethos,” “Pathos,” “Eros,” “Logos.” I considered doing a very big painting for each group with the two extras as stand-alone images. But that didn’t feel right. And I don’t really want to work so big in my spare room home studio anyway. The two paintings of my parents both happened to be 14” x 18” and that seemed a good size for the Tarot panels. Panels because canvas stretched on board to feel and look a bit more like playing cards. So it should be possible to hang all five on a wall at once, and to even rotate them through the seasons and so forth…

Initially, my plan to join the City-Wide Open Studios was to garner a wall to hang the first group of five on—“Ethos”—which should be in a quincunx with #1 in the center, #2 above, #3 to the left, #4 below, #5 to the right. My hope was to do one a month and have all five done by September. It didn’t happen and COVID meant no wall anyway. So, here are the three I consider “done” as of now. #4, “XV The Devil” is begun and #5, “IX The Hermit,” may be by the end of October? In any case, I’ll add them as they come along.

 

4. Tarot Panel 1: “0 The Fool” (April-May, 2020; 14" x 18")

 

The standard image—borrowed from the Golden Dawn Tarot pack developed by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith—is of an aesthete-looking guy stepping off a cliff while brandishing a flower and carrying a knapsack. I didn’t ponder too long over this card because I’ve drawn a couple different adaptations of it, in different contexts, over the years. The main change was to depart from motley for the Fool—I liked the association with the Fool in King Lear, one of my favorite Shakespeare characters in one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. But this time I wanted a contemporary fool, and the act of checking his phone while stepping into the abyss struck me as irresistible. His clothes came from a google search of hip threads of the times, while the figure’s stance came from Rodin’s statue “John the Baptist preaching.” I needed a naturalistic space, I felt, so the fact of his imminent plunge would be clear. I selected the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, well-known as “the Cliffs of Insanity” in The Princess Bride. And the Fool’s features are meant to recall those of the young Hermann Hesse (around the time he wrote Knulp, a novella about a free-spirit who wanders about without any ties to person or place) whose works helped me, as a teen, get into Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which I associate with the spirit of The Fool, in its more philosophical inspirations. (For more synopsis, via a song playlist, go here.)

5. Tarot Panel 2: “XIX The Sun” (May-September, 2020; 14" x 18")

 

Unlike the Fool, which has a story of sorts, the Sun is mostly just a symbol, or else it’s the heavenly body itself. To paint a picture of the sun is not an easy thing to do, and what should its foreground or background be? All along I knew—drawing again on the Waite-Smith deck—that there would be a young nude male in the image. He should be an embodiment of the Sun. A Sun-child. The Sun god. The search went out for cherubs and cupids and a number were found that might suffice. In the end I came to rely, mostly, on the figure of Cupid that stands, mini-me style, on a first-century statue of Augustus Caesar from Prima Porta. Except that my Cupid-Sun figure would be holding a glass up to see his own countenance. To get the look on his face was a long bout of trial and error—at one point I had a face that was quite lyrical and dreamy, then a self-satisfied look that reminded me of the young Marlon Brando, and a couple others. The face that finally emerged owes something to an image of a Renaissance putti a facebook friend happened to post. The idea is that The Sun is personified as a nude man-child looking raptly at himself in a kind of “sun bubble” that flourishes with sunflowers and corn, to symbolize summer in my part of the world, while below all is desolate sunbaked wasteland, recalling two famous poetic lines: “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”) and “boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away” (from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”). (For more synopsis, via a song playlist, go here.)

6. Tarot Panel 3: “I The Magus” (July-September, 2020; 14" x 18")

The figure of the Magus, or Magician, should be potent. Initially, my conception of the figure I wanted to portray drew on Jimi Hendrix, a magician of the guitar whose playing first held me rapt around age 10 (when Hendrix was still alive). Some subsequent thought made me think of merging Hendrix with Prince, a musical figure from my own generation to whom he could be compared in creating a unique niche in rock music as a black artist. The image would be a charismatic performer, maybe with a guitar maybe not, kneeling on a stage singing into a microphone, his clothes a flamboyant mash-up of Jimi and Prince. For further inspiration I compiled a tape alternating songs by the two performers. Then came the protests for the ruthless murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (Prince’s hometown) and my Magus would have to be seen taking a knee. He would hold his microphone aloft to invite the voices of the crowd, his raised finger showering sparks—perhaps incendiary, perhaps illuminating. His hat I borrowed from a photo of Lamont Steptoe, a black poet-friend of mine from Philadelphia, while the rainbow sash recalls Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge and the alchemy of colors in “Bold as Love,” as well as the rainbow of LGBTQ awareness. The plaque in the background copies an ancient Egyptian relief of the god Thoth, a kind of analogue to the Greek god Hermes, known for his magical knowledge and for having given humanity writing, and often associated with The Magus card. The Ankh symbol on the hat I used to wear on a chain around my neck, in high school, and is generally interpreted as a symbol for eternal life.