It is an axiom that art as a whole does not improve over time. Art changes but good art is always good art.

However, it is clear that modernist innovation over the last 150 years has brought extreme changes, vastly enlarging the range of what will be accepted as art, and this, in turn, gives artists freedom to choose what form their art will take. This freedom does not mean art gets better; it is more a burden than a gift. But it does mean that a painter’s most fundamental choice – what and how to paint – must be worked out from a great number of choices at the inception.

All painting – one could argue that Ann Walsh’s are more collage than painting, but it is inconsequential – especially innovative modernist work, asks that you accept the artist’s formal choice as a precondition for judging their success. Walsh has always been inventive with materials.

I recall her “reverse” pictures painted on clear polyethylene. In recent years she has been making pictures that juxtapose 2 or 3 carefully adjusted shaped and abutted sheets of colored vinyl, originally rectilinear and recently beginning to curve internally somewhat. Everything is subsumed by color. In fact, these pictures can almost be said to be nothing but color; her brilliant choice of colored vinyl sheets rather than paint amounts to working with a vehicle as close to dematerialized color as anything could be, and recalls Jules Olitski’s wish to spray color in the air and experience it as such.

Dematerialized color is a physical impossibility and monocolor – a simple one-colored surface – is an ineffective cliché and by now overdone, so the prerequisite for a “color artist” such as Olitski or Walsh, or perhaps Morris Louis, who threw color against the edge to keep it pure and unmixed, is to contrive a work that insists on color as the primary expressive vehicle as such. Olitski did it with low-variation sprayed surfaces and edge-drawing that proclaims the work as a painting, and Walsh does it by putting forward uninterrupted expanses of pure color in carefully adjusted combination. Recently she has introduced mild curvature into an originally rectilinear format, eliminating real-world intimations of stability, and turning structural dynamism into casual delicacy – less a “tough” visualization of lateral tension than the sudden beauty of a windblown curtain.

Color in a Walsh picture may be separated from its usual role of area differentiation but this only activates their pictorial function. They talk to each other in the language of color, and once you adapt to the radical intentions of Walsh’s art you enter into the discussion. Guess (2014), for example, centers a highly saturated green in a surround of a highly saturated red/pink – close opposites on the color wheel – surrounded in turn by a less saturated tint of the red/pink color as a kind of buffer or coda. It’s like a discussion among friends presented in a format that allows one to “hear” it visually.

Walter Pater said, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”. Ann Walsh’s pictures, like music, sensuously adjust and contrast singular elements of visual art for your delight. They are wonderful pictures. Enjoy them!

Alexander/Heath Contemporary Art Gallery, 425 Campbell Avenue SW, Roanoke, VA 24016. alexander-heath.com

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 This essay, originally titled “This Bud’s For You,” is one of four published in the exhibition catalogue for Walter Robinson’s career survey which was seen at the University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal in 2014 and travels early next year to Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia (January 23 to March 12). Other essayists are Vanessa Mielke Schulman, Charles F. Stuckey and the exhibition’s curator, Barry Blinderman. The essay appears in artcritical’s “extract” series devoted to important exhibitions by New York-based artists not scheduled to be seen in the city. There will be a book signing by the artist at Max Fish, 120 Orchard Street, New York, November 5, 6-8PM.

Walter Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from the Boston Globe who exposed sexual abuse by priests in the Diocese of Boston. He is also known for his musical compositions, especially his lyrical song “Harriet Tubman.” A noted radiologist, he heads the Department of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois. A legendary cricketer, he is also the front man of the Jimi Hendrix tribute band, Haze of Purple. There is an elementary school named after him in Bayonne, New Jersey.

But THE Walter Robinson is the co-founder of the legendary by-artists- for-artists magazine, Art-Rite, and while avoiding painting he served as editor and chief reporter and critic of the online journal Artnet. He was the dryly hilarious regular correspondent on the pretense-tweaking television show, Gallery Beat, and he remains one of the toughest competitors on The Kostabi Show, Mark Kostabi’s name-the-painting cable-TV program.

Robinson thinks he was a contributing editor to Art in America from 1979 to 1996, but actually he is still on its masthead. As a critic and observer of the world of art, he is a paragon of educated and enlightened drollery. But all of this is window dressing. Despite all his attempts to prove otherwise, Walter Robinson is an artist.

Many of the women in his heroically romantic paintings might have appeared later in Richard Prince’s Nurse paintings, or they could be the daughters of the models seen in Mel Ramos paintings. In any case, perhaps under the influence of gin or pep pills—and Robinson has painted those kinds of intoxicants too—the pulp fiction heroines exemplified vice as virtue and sin as salvation. He also did spin artist, long before Damien Hirst, and Walter’s spin paintings are more centrifugally forceful and more evocative of the rotary LSD experience. They really set the controls for the heart of the sun.

A famous raconteur, Walter is known for his bon mots and so he is a much sought after speaker who will go to great lengths to disappear before reaching the podium. Last December I asked him to be part of a panel discussion on value and the art market and he accepted. When he didn’t appear on the dais I was worried but later I found that he was simply unable to tear himself away from the buffet at the event.

A man noted for sound and resilient appetites, Walter translates his lust for life to the canvas with verve, panache and a wit that ranges from extra dry to demi-sec. His food paintings don’t take a back seat to those of Ramos or Wayne Thiebaud. And when it comes to depictions of sheer concupiscence, his oozies are doozies, his slatterns are comfortingly slatternly, his hussies aren’t fussy and his wantons aren’t frontin’. The guy can paint and, in doing so, conjure a world so gone it never existed. Is he the Elizabeth Peyton of insensitivity? The Francis Picabia of peccadillos? The Balthus of swingers? Some of his titles, like Savage Destiny and Divine Weakness, suggest the lambently lustful nature of his visual lyricism. What does it amount to? I’ve always thought that apotheosis strikes when you least expect it.

The pen (or Sharpie), they still say is mightier than the sword, but with the pen and the brush combined, you’re outclassing both the blade and the bludgeon. It’s a great pleasure to see the full return engagement of an artist who has been too absent from the center of the scene, while documenting it brilliantly from the periphery with a sage and not entirely jaundiced eye. Walter returned to exhibiting when the time was right.

Fifty-six years ago Elaine de Kooning related, “Fairfield [Porter] says: ‘Why is irrelevancy so often taken for profundity?’” Walter Robinson has no truck with irrelevance. Having surveyed the eld he knows what he wants, and all claims to the contrary, he knows how to get it. He understands the humanity of art that ventures beyond the pale of chic and institutional chicanery. Relevance is perhaps the new forbidden fruit. Two decades ago this world was not ready for the full bloom of Robinson’s art, but the world has grown up and lost its prissy faux innocence. Someday soon prurience will return with a vengeance. As I once said, “an erection caused by art is no mean feat.”

In that spirit, rarely has a retrospective seemed so prospective. I declare that now is the time for this sort of unashamedly manly art, and for artists unafraid of riotous condiments, of smegma and sublimity, of Vaseline and gasoline, and of the explosive redolence of drool and sti es. In the bouquet of aestheticism, there are blooms and thorns, pollen and petals, but Walter Robinson, this Bud’s for you.

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Witty. Elegant. Playful. Subtle. Comical. Frontal. Multi-faceted. Confrontational. Friendly. Thoughtful. Forthright. Singular. Incremental. Alive. I made this rather erratic list in Don Porcaro’s studio during a prolonged encounter with the works in this exhibition. Inspired by a conversation with Porcaro about his family’s heritage, I jotted down the Italian word prepotente – roughly “self-important” – a response, I suspect, to the insistently animated, “look at me” quality of Porcaro’s vertical assemblages of slices of colored stone. And then there’s our awareness of both the unified form and the physicality of Porcaro’s recent constructions–the dry stoniness of the layered limestone and marble. Each of his exquisitely crafted stacks of delicately varied hues has as much personality and eccentricity as an idiosyncratic individual. Spending time with Porcaro’s upright sculptures we begin to feel as if we’re at a party with a crowd of lively, extravagantly dressed guests. The notably different tops of each of the sculptures can appear as inventive hats and the often hilarious feet on some of the most refined of them suggest that these uprights might just scuttle off if our company doesn’t hold their attention. But soon Porcaro’s ability to invent expressive masses claims our attention—we begin to think about his suavely articulated volumes in relation to Constantin Brancusi’s ravishingly pared-down, eloquent forms and the party chatter quiets down.

This double reading of Porcaro’s sculpture is obviously what triggered the wide-ranging list of words that introduced this essay. It’s also an important aspect of what makes his work so compelling. His earlier polychromed pieces combining stone, metal, concrete and paint were unabashed fusions of the grotesque and the toy-like, conflations, as the artist has said, of “the monster and the child;” confronted by these sculptures, whether “life-size,” knee-high, or scaled to the hand, we began to wonder whether we had stumbled into Hieronymus Bosch’s world of sinister hybrid creatures or a particularly sophisticated aisle in F.A.O. Schwartz. Porcaro’s emphasis on stone in his recent work has expanded his vocabulary of allusions, to some extent because of the character of his chosen materials. The exuberant polychromy of his earlier sculpture not only helped bring his inventions to life, but it unified disparate materials and the variety of textures allowed us to read his complex composites as singular, albeit multi-colored, vivacious objects. Yet we also remained aware of color as an addition. Porcaro began to concentrate on the chromatic and textural possibilities of a palette of stone in 2011 when he was working on a project in Slovenia investigating the range of hues available in Croatian marble. He liked the way the variations of delicately colored stone allowed him to seamlessly integrate chroma, texture, and mass. At the same time he created substantial vertical forms by stacking slices of limestone and marble that permitted him to create volume with an additive, improvisatory approach similar to that of his earlier mixed-media constructions.

While no less animated than his “Boschian” mixed-media creatures, Porcaro’s recent stone sculptures seem, at least initially, to be slightly more solemn in their associations, while retaining the sense of multiple readings that has traditionally been characteristic of his work. We are struck first by the singularity of the forms, by the way these unignorable objects loom up before us, occupying our space and demanding our attention. Yet we are also soon aware of the multivalent character of those singular forms. We note the many layers of stone, each slightly different in hue and surface, that make up the unified masses. We begin to think both about the process of accumulation and about natural stratified rock formations, while, in part because of the generous scale and verticality of these sculptures, we think, as well, about classical architecture. The swelling, upward thrust of Porcaro’s recent works suggests the way the columns on Doric temples are modulated to correct for optical distortion. Yet, at the same time, Porcaro being Porcaro, the undulating profiles of his upright sculptures, tapering to narrow tops, recall nothing so much as personable robots; or for those of us who spent childhood rainy days in the antique libraries of summer houses, we recall the tightly corseted society ladies of a certain age or caricatured butlers in satirical New Yorker magazine cartoons of the 1920s. The contrasting sinuous shapes and textures of the sculptures’ tops, assembled from many different sources, intensify the sense of personality and individuality. Porcaro refers to them as “caps,” “heads,” or even “a hookah.” He courts these varied connections, deliberately intending both to ground and to enliven his works by means of what he calls “a kind of reference.” The combination of tapering forms and the narrow edges of the sliced stone provokes still other associations—the elongated necks of the African tribal women whose traditional dress includes stacks of necklaces, for example. Porcaro says, too, that he wants the sense of compression that image elicits; it’s yet another component in the notable animation of his constructions.

Even when Porcaro ventures into more conceptual territory, as in the engaging Cabinet of Nomads, 2015, an installation of a multiplicity of small, colored forms elevated on legs and arranged on shelves, each individual part is as charged as any of his larger works. This sculpture is a new iteration of an earlier concept that had its origins in Porcaro’s concern with the steadily growing population of the world. Now, the work has been reconfigured both to represent both the troubling rise of displaced people world wide and to celebrate the United Nations. The many components that carry the symbolic weight of the sculpture are intimate in size, suggesting that, like toys, they could be picked up and handled. Yet for all their playful overtones, they are also, like all of Porcaro’s works, thoughtful, self-contained, and self-referential. Cabinet of Nomads is confrontational. We feel held accountable for something, even if we’re not quite sure what it is. This kind of multivalence is why Porcaro’s sculpture not only draws our attention but also holds it. At a moment when art is often over-explained or loaded with irony, his work asserts that serious ideas, both aesthetic and otherwise, can be presented by purely visual means, with wit and humor, without compromising either seriousness or wit. That’s both valuable and important.

Karen Wilkin is a New York based independent curator and critic.

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It’s a common refrain among artists: to really get to know a painting, you have to see it in the flesh. The subtle shifts of color, the physicality of the paint, and the impact of its full dimensions — none of these can be replicated on screen or in print. All, however, count among the most elemental properties of painting, and for some artists, their qualities are so complex and subtle that they warrant a lifetime of study.

Geoffrey Dorfman is clearly such an artist. His paintings — produced through a discipline of constant improvisation — possess a bodily presence, a fleshiness, all their own. Talking about painting with Dorfman, one senses that for him it is not just a calling but a moral commitment. Gestures of paint have weight, colors have substance, and the two inform each other. “Color and texture are not separate,” the artist maintains. “Painting stands absolutely against disembodied color.”

Words will forever fall short in conveying the visual and tactile expressions of painting. Yet it seems safe to say that, for Dorfman the first gestures of paint start the hope of uncovering meaningful forms; the gathering flux confirms and strengthens these forms’ identities, and if all goes well, the forms become real — not as references to the external and literal, but according to the energies of paint itself. (“The painting is telling you exactly what it needs.”) It’s a process of incited accidents in which painter and paint are accomplices.

No surface in a Dorfman canvas remains static. Areas that seem at first an even glow of color turn out to be layers of inter-brushed pigments. The quality of space continuously changes; a portion of a canvas may seem like a close-up, shallow, clear-running stream, or as deep as an alpine lake or a hall of mirrors — though one suspects that the artist would reject even such lyrical allusions to the external.

In Pink Cabinet, condensations of forms punctuate a background of tawny green-browns. One’s eye — or really, one’s mind — wants to impose the familiar: an area could be darkening due to a cast shadow, and a “ground plane” lightening up because of vagaries of illumination. But such imaginings soon dance away in the sheer ineluctability of paint, which ranges in texture from buttery, knife-skimmed surfaces to lumpy coagulations to thin, canvas-revealing brushstrokes. Colors hum from within these turgid textures: a curl of intense white tops a sturdy, deep mauve; wandering greens incise a hard, pure yellow; oranges and greens streak in ethereal layers. (These may be Dorfman’s “shape wannabees” — forms half-emerging from the depths.) Spreading across the surface in a kind of urgent play, each element somehow remains mindful of others as well as the canvas edges.

Dorman likes to compare painting to following a thread through a labyrinth. One proceeds as best one can, but the way is never sure: “The thread breaks; you pick up the wrong thread.” Viewing a group of his canvases together, one is particularly struck by their divergent paths. Iolas follows an entirely different color scheme than Cabinet, with a dense, pink-beige background irradiated in places by an underlying yellow. Arrayed around the top and left of this canvas are a series of small, tightly drawn arcs and angling lines, some containing contrasting pulses of color. Each hue reacts to the ground in different fashion: a brilliant yellow, though close in tone, lifts aloofly; purples sink as anchoring notes; whites converse among themselves, some floating as thick, opaque strokes of paint, others revealing themselves (up close) as bare parts of canvas. Other paintings — Sun Scratch, Portal, and Inez — take a very different tack, turning to denser all-over tapestries of color.

In some canvases, faint, window-like patterns cordon off a section, momentarily redefining a few square inches as an escape, and the surrounding ones as a confining interior. Such an incident occurs in Augury, but it’s a subtle sideshow within the larger drama of merging purple and green tides, whose collision sets off a series of curious events, including a pair of misaligned blue-green half-circles and an irregular bull’s-eye of concentric polygons, ”a shard within a shard.” Across this same canvas, two pale rectangles — one a lightly limned outline, the other a gap between broad, thick brushstrokes — elicit contrary states of presence and absence.

The primal forces in Dorfman’s paintings seem at once alien and familiar. They contain animated spaces, without any kind of fixed topography; a sense of internal scale without preconceived notions of height, width or depth; presences without the usual distinctions — so crucial to our everyday perceptions—between object and void. We must dig deeper than our usual cognitive powers to come to grips with these canvases. But they compel us to try, as we follow best we can the thread left by the artist who preceded us, searching countless paths. “You have order. You depart from the order. Then you come back to it.”

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Although most of the painters who were grouped under the rubric of conceptual abstraction have continued to work productively in the subsequent decades, it was never recognized as a dominant form of contemporary art-making. Other trends garnered more attention: the in-your-face figurative painting of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage; the topical art rooted in identity politics, feminism, and queer theory of Glenn Ligon or the early work of Sue Williams; and the relational aesthetics of artists like Félix González-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija, to name a few. For all that, the issues raised by conceptual abstraction never went away, and to one degree or another, they continued to be a (not always acknowledged) stimulus to the efforts of younger artists such as Matthew Ritchie, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Kristin Baker, and others — and such as Dannielle Tegeder, one of the most interesting in this tendency and the subject of this exhibition.

In a sense, Tegeder turns the guiding intuition — what some might call the ideology — of the reductivist tradition inside out: This intuition tells the artist that as more and more of what had formerly been the matter of art could be jettisoned, that is, as the work came closer and closer to arriving at some concentrated essence, the fuller and more powerful it would be; the fewer elements it could have, the more complete it would be. What Tegeder realizes — perhaps more than any of the other artists who have emerged from the semi-secret tradition of so-called conceptual abstraction—is the rather frightening corollary of the reductivist intuition, which is that when the artwork is complexified, stratified, and subjected to what Stephen Westfall called the “ongoing cultural condition of hyper-contextualization,” then the work loses its grip on any sense of completion, of wholeness, and becomes ever more fragmented, contradictory, underdetermined, and irrational (in the way an irrational number, such as pi, turns out to be endless). A certain arbitrariness comes into play.

In a condition that embraces complexity and hyper-referentiality, any particular work seems always to point beyond itself, not only to the real world, but to its systemic relations with other works; the work that does not complete itself within its frame links up with others. Thus, Tegeder’s paintings (including paintings on paper) do not communicate a sense of formal containment; their multiplicity of rectilinear elements rarely re-mark or echo the containing edges of the rectangular panel or paper support, nor do they reiterate its flatness. But, neither do they conjure a self-consistent fictional world. Instead, a plurality of diagrammatic spaces seems to be overlaid in such a way that they hold each other in place, however precariously, without actually cohering. That this represents a distinctly dystopian attitude is clear from some of Tegeder’s titles, such as Monument to the Geo-Chemistry After Structure with Yellow DISTURBANCE Code and Disaster Averter and Atomic Station (2009) or Puriamond: Cascade System of Destruction & Explosions (2007); a different kind of irony can be detected in Instructions for Utopian Gray World Machine & Copper Inner Structure (2007) where the self-evident contradiction in the phrase “utopian gray” seems to comment on how the dynamic élan of an El Lissitzky might have devolved into the quietist stasis of Gerhard Richter’s gray, which, as he has said, “makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other color has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.” This gray does after all represent a kind of opening, but only insofar as it is anything but utopian.

Tegeder would probably agree with Richter in this, but the saturnine gravity that comes perhaps all too easily to him is not her way. Her art may evoke disturbance and destruction, but in a strangely playful way: There may always be some disaster afoot, but no disaster is ever total. Some fundamentally constructive energy remains to keep things afloat. Richter admitted that his art had to work through to beauty, but it had to be, he specified, “not a carefree beauty, but rather a serious one.” Tegeder, by contrast, finds a carefree beauty in serious ideas. There are still, as another of her titles would have it — this time of a multipart painting from 2011 — Structures of Possibility.

In fact, incompleteness and self-contradiction seem to be the very basis of possibility, as this work suggests. None of the five parts of Structures of Possibility completes any of the others; each one, by introducing new colors, new shapes, new vectors of energy that could not have been anticipated through one’s perception of the other four, affirms that each, on its own, harbors visual possibilities that could only have been manifested in concert with the others and not separately. In a sense, such a work might have been extended indefinitely, incorporating ever more elements, ever more contexts. But a sufficient point of completion has arrived when the work succeeds in intimating its own infinite expandability; to go further would have been redundant. In this sense, Tegeder’s work cultivates the fragment — yet makes a system of it,
an ensemble that is more than a simple juxtaposition of unrelated parts.

What is true of the parts of a painting is true of Tegeder’s oeuvre as a whole, which includes not only painting but so many other kinds of things. It is easy to see that her sculptures might almost be concatenations of forms extracted from the diagrammatic linear webs found in her paintings and expanded three-dimensionally — yet always, I think, holding out the possibility for further expandability still, so that one always tends to see these sculptures both as works in and of themselves and as models for constructions that might exist on some vast cosmic scale as in Suspended Galaxy System (2010) or, yet again, of phenomena that might already exist on a molecular scale. The sculptures thus reveal the paintings to contain possibilities that could never be realized pictorially but this does not mean that the sculptures themselves constitute some ultimate realization. They too suggest possibilities yet unrealized, perhaps unrealizable: They are indeed “forecast machines,” as the title of one (Traveling Forecast Machine with Octave Construction, 2009) would have it. The Library of Abstract Sound (2009) extracts, not three-dimensional forms, but sounds, occurring in the fourth dimension of time, born from the ostensibly two dimensions of paintings on paper. In doing so Tegeder imposes a new kind of incompletion on visual forms: Until we not only see them but hear them, do we really know them?

The titles of Tegeder’s earlier works point to another dimension of the artwork’s incompletion: language — and by supplying the missing element, the incompletion is not remedied but magnified. Few artists have ever used such long titles; take for example a piece from 2004, Alitipia: Community Under Construction with Jumbo Love Dot Boiler; Six Safety Vessel Stations, Containing Habitats and Rainbow Structures; Five Square Two High Rises; Dangling Safety Chrysalis; Abandoned Oz City; Side Room with Circle Storage Nexus; Interconnecting Underground Transportation Network with Abandoned Square Tower Blue Day Time Underground Water City, with Multi-Square Housing Project and Side Village with Hidden Headquarters and White Circle Plan Streamer with Airline Resistant Habitat Structures and Secret Square Gardens. It’s as though every time an element is added, it conjures the necessity of adding still another. Again, the point is not even to follow this through to exhaustion but only far enough to imply inexhaustibility. Even if Tegeder’s titles have grown less profusely elaborate, they remain no less essential to her work. She has used various methods and, as she calls them, “literary games” in their invention. “I keep a large jar in the studio where I collect found text that I later use in titles,” she explains. “I also cut up hundreds of actual city names and recombine them into new fictional city names, then create anagrams from the materials and colors in the works.” Affinities with Burroughs and Cage, Surrealism and Oulipo are hardly accidental. No wonder that she has also used language independently of its functionality in titling, treating it as an artistic substance in itself, in the form of books. But this brings me to the threshold of another dimension of Tegeder’s work, a threshold which this is not the occasion for me to cross: One more reminder that with this artist, the structures of possibility are never finished. Something can still be done with Modernism to the extent that it keeps building itself by taking itself apart.

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David Plante will give a reading from Becoming A Londoner at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm.  

Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree. Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

– – –

We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.
Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos. As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . . And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train! Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

– – –

R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.
R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.
His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well. He can have a mad look.
There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyer and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back.

Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too. Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

Their understanding is: never with friends.

Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

– – –

While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist  painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, refl ective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

– – –

Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’ David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he fi nally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’ Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’ David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’

Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’

I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.   Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’ I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’

Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’

‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’

Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.

– – –

Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to fl oat. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!

– – –

I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:

For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.

– – –

A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.

I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.

When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.

But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?

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“One word says everything about the people from whom I come and to whom I remain faithful because I find in myself all their defects: minor.  It is not an “inferior” people, it is a people for whom everything turns out small scale, in miniature (not to say caricature), even misfortune.” E.M.Cioran

As if a riposte to Cioran’s talk of “smallness,” the Romania of Serban Savu’s childhood, and the present-day Romania he describes, was and is the victim of colossal hubris.  He was eleven years old when, in the revolution of 1989—less than velvet compared with other East European countries—Nicolae Ceau?escu was deposed and executed, ending his quarter century dictatorship and four decades of communist rule.  The sufferings to which Ceau?escu subjected his country were anything but diminutive. An obsession with driving down national debt and a determination to destroy peasant culture led to years of economic stultification, the physical eradication of half the country’s 13,000 villages, the demolition of swathes of historic city fabric and the permanent scarring of the land with mindless and humungous structures, whether the utterly absurd House of the People, in Bucharest (at three times the size of Versailles, it was, in the words of Tony Judt, “a monstrous lapidary metaphor for unconstrained tyranny”) or conglomerations of mass housing, the “agro-towns” to which dispossessed peasants were sent, incongruously placed in the middle of nowhere.

In response to false grandeur, Savu often paints buildings and industrial structures that are imposing and drab. The eponymous edifice in The Gray 10-floor Block (2008) leaves no room for the sky above it, nor do the abutting blocks in the corner of Unveiling the New Furniture (2010). Savu’s attitude towards communism’s ubiquitous housing projects is ambivalent.  His paintings often acknowledge the stoic dignity of its drab modernism.  His brush finds hidden beauty in decaying concrete comparable to that discovered by the 18th-century Welsh painter Thomas Jones in the back streets of Naples.  The arrangement of browns and grays in the cropped segment of façade in Parking Sunday (2008) has a quiet poetry akin to a still life by Giorgio Morandi.  But beyond aestheticism, his accommodations of brutalist buildings into soft, lyrical landscapes, such as Ludus (2009) for instance, seems to carry a spiritual argument with its non-judgmental juxtaposition of an old village and an agro-town. This sweet and sour image is rich in possible meanings, but at various levels, it is cathartic, a consoling message to his countrymen.  It seems to say that nature can heal wounds, that the disruptive and also potently symbolic dichotomy of these two settlements on different sides of the river and all they represent about futures and pasts can nonetheless blend in some kind of post-historical picturesque.

There are two striking, seemingly contradictory features in the half-decade span of Savu’s short career: an unmistakable Savu look, and significant diversity.  Mood and purpose are consistent, but touch varies almost from canvas to canvas, determined by pictorial content and scale of each image rather than some stylistic progression. He works from photographs, some found in the media and others taken himself, which he assembles into working sources in Photoshop.  His locales are all actual places he knows and studies.  In some paintings there is a tough tightness to the realism, whether of the figures or buildings; in others there is painterly relish, as if within the last five years there are distinctions of touch as marked in Savu as in the extended career of the German 19th-century realist Adolph Menzel, who veered from early impressionism to a finessed classicism.  Savu’s smaller canvases, which often focus on a single figure and a singular observation, are often his most winning.

The more ambitious works, the multi-figure group compositions, are more forcibly touched with an element of incongruity yet they too hold back from full-blown absurdity, or even Surrealism. The Ceau?escu regime was so “surreal” in some of its manifestations – the surveillance techniques of the Securitate, the publishing of Ileana Ceau?escu’s pseudo-science, the cult of leadership that dubbed Ceau?escu “the Genius of the Carpathians, the Danube of Thought” – that Surrealism presents itself as an option to writers like Nobel laureate Herta Müller who, in one of her novels, has an apple tree that grows a mouth with which to devour its own fruit. Even at his most outlandish, Savu is closer to the incipient oddity of Giorgio de Chirico, say, than the overt weirdness of Salvador Dalí or the punning illogic of René Magritte.  Indeed, it is the degree of credibility in the scenes he depicts, and the slow unfolding of futility or misguidedness, that lends his scenes their charge.  He comes close to a symbolic uncanny (akin to the moral of folly in the inverse building construction of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel [1569]) in his painting The Old Roof (2009) in which four boys play soccer on the roof of a building whose center is dominated by a perilous two-storey courtyard.  There is still the possibility of a rational, prosaic explanation as to what is going on, however, that the boys are engaged in a dare-devil game in which the chasm of a courtyard adds gladiatorial risk to proceedings.

While Surrealism is a valid option for Müller in stories directly confronting the horrors of the Ceau?escu regime and the consequences of offering it resistance, to Savu and his close-knit circle of peers who were at art school together in Cluj, and whose study and launch of career take place post-1989, something more subtle and diffident is called for to describe the numbed state of reconstruction, of discovering normality amidst the ruins of a failed regime, and of coming to terms with the past as children of its last years, and of parents who had simply to keep their heads down and survive.  They are a generation that seems skeptical of big gestures and grand narratives.  It is telling that many of them have exhibited with the Cluj gallery Plan B whose very name betokens a bemused sense of what to do next.  Savu’s close associate, Ciprian Mure?an, works in a variety of conceptual and traditional modes but consistently in ways that send up the hubris of systems and situations with a gentle, comic understatement: exquisite pastiches of socialist realist drawings of (glue sniffing) young pioneers blowing into plastic bags; young school children reading Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros; a wall text, using vinyl cut from old LPs, that says, in English, “Communism Never Happened.” Mure?an’s gentle provocations seem intended to place him out of the market of big gestures.  There is, likewise, a wry and diminutive sensibility at play in Cristi Pog?cean’s sculpture, Modernist Bird House 2005-07, where the rationalist, functionalist architectural style adopted by the Party in mass housing units takes on markedly different attributes in this dainty, effete folly.

Savu’s delicious painterly touch is too assured to equate with the dazed and confused state of mind of the characters and situations he depicts, and yet there are elements in his style – his quietude, understatement, eclecticism, lack of flashiness – that relate to the shellshock mood of the post-1989 generation.

Though he attended the prestigious art school in Cluj, Savu is largely self-taught in his realism.  There is a common misconception about contemporary Eastern European artists that somehow, like Russian or Chinese artists, they must automatically be steeped in the language and techniques of academic socialist realism as if these are residual skills still enforced in art schools. Savu’s professor at Cluj in the 1990s was the neo-romantic painter Ioan Sbarciu, a colleague of the German neo-expressionist Markus Lüpertz and now a senator in Romania’s parliament, who would certainly have had no reason to enforce redundant styles.  Savu’s older colleague, Victor Man, took himself to Jerusalem to study at the small, independent atelier of expatriate American painter Israel Hershberg, the Jerusalem Studio School, to learn the old master techniques he craved.  Savu found his technique from close study of renaissance painting during an extended residency in Venice in 2002-04 (as recipient of the Nicolae Lorga postgraduate research grant) and this perhaps accounts for the relative primitivism in his handling of form, which is anti-academic.  In Cluj, while still a student, Man had sought out the underground painter Cornel Brudascu, an artist who had been persecuted by the regime for his sexual orientation and painted in eclectic styles.  Excelling as a flower painter, Brudascu became a personal hero to Man, Savu and a third young painter, Adrian Ghenie simply for his determination to do his own thing.  Savu’s painterly language, therefore, should not be read as an ironic riff on socialist realism in the way that makes conceptual sense in relation to the German Neo Rauch, who studied at Leipzig in the 1980s and makes skillful use of appropriated, anachronistic painting modes.

This argument does not preclude symbolic significance in elements of Savu’s style.  There is almost a willful dullness in his invariably subdued palette and a certain chalkiness in the texture of his paint that matches his pervasive melancholy.  That concrete is so prevalent a motif lends an odd associative feeling that somehow dust has rubbed off the buildings into the very pigment.  His dry, slow, carefully modulated paint application contrasts with the oily  flourishes favored by Man (in earlier works) and Ghenie.  Savu’s literal lack of slickness accords with the temper of his paintings.

Introducing art theory to the distinction between scale and size, Alberti exhorts the reader of his treatise on painting with the words: “Istoria gives greater renown to the intellect than any colossus.” Savu’s paintings are a profound record of a society in recovery from colossal errors of governance.  Recently, he has embarked on what are for him large paintings, but most typically, he is happy with a modest scale, and as has been suggested, a modest touch, pace and emotional distance.  He works in an idiom that is in two distinct senses “out” of history: it is historically derived (though without constituting a quotation or pastiche a particular moment) and it is out of step with current expectations. In much the way that American artists Elizabeth Peyton, Paul R. or Duncan Hannah adopt an illustrative, knowingly slight language that matches their penchant for nostalgia and infatuation, and within whose limiting confines there is nonetheless space for expressive growth, so Savu adopts a plainspoken style that risks blandness for the sake of empathy with his subject, and as an antidote to the bombastic imposition of grand schemes. This suggests, in contrast with his meteoric career successes as an artist collected avidly around the world, a kind of elective minority, a willingness to occupy a small corner of painting. Savu has found a niche where he can observe a future for his countrymen and work one out for his art.

Extracted by kind permission of Hatje Cantz.  Serban Savu: Paintings 2005-2010 is available from David Nolan Gallery and good booksellers

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In March 2010, painters Joyce Kozloff and Robert Kushner sat at their computers to write an appreciation of Tony Robbin’s work and his participation in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In reviewing the P & D reunion exhibition at the Hudson River Museum, the critic Holland Cotter called the work of these artists “the last genuine art movement of the 20th century, which was also the first and only art movement of the post-modern era and may prove to be the last art movement ever” (New York Times, January 15, 2008). Kozloff, Kushner, Robbin, and the other artists identified with this group have gone on to distinguished individual careers, yet all of them retain the energy and imagery of their original enthusiasms.

The early 1970s was a period of intense exploration, on a societal as well as an individual level. The “anything goes, everything should be questioned” attitude of the 1960s was still in full force, not just the simple feel-good quality of Woodstock but, more importantly, a thoughtful analysis of every social system. The art world and the responsibility of the individual artist were no exception. RK

For me, it was the women’s movement, which exploded in my life in 1970. We questioned all our relationships, everything we had ever learned in school, and the very nature of art. Many of us cut our activist teeth in political groups; despite their moments of conflict, there was so much joy, optimism, energy, even utopianism. Tony Robbin was part of maverick curator Marcia Tucker’s improvisational theater group and a member of a men’s consciousness-raising group, before we formed the Pattern and Decoration movement. JK

For those who did not experience the art world of those years, it is nearly impossible to envision the monolithic acceptance of minimal and formalist thought. For gallery and museum acceptance, if the art was industrial-looking, rectangular, and gray, black, or white, it was shown. Grids, so long as they remained uninflected, were acceptable. Everything else (except color field painting, which today can be viewed as Technicolor minimalism) seemed to be marginalized. This simply did not fit many of our temperaments. Gray was boring. We wanted our art to be a lasting experience that took a great deal of time to decode fully. RK

But this dominant aesthetic was out of sync with the rush of pleasure emerging from the counter-culture and the sexual revolution. Adventurous artists were searching for role models in nontraditional arts, and gender boundaries were becoming porous. We were seeing films from all over the globe and listening to world music. The hermeticism and provincialism of the New York art world became painfully obvious. JK

Art that led out of the “art box,” away from a cold Minimalism, was essential as a reflection of our desire to create a rich, complex and encompassing art. We were even willing to accept that taboo word—decoration. Earlier, to say that a work was “decorative” signified a trivial intention. We all took on that burden and declared that the decorative was the only way to fully describe the kinds of sources we were looking at and incorporating into our art. RK

In the fall of 1974, there was a Pattern Painting panel chaired by Mario Yrisarry at the Artists Talk on Art series (public discussions that took place every week in Soho). Valerie Jaudon described it: “The other artists on the panel were grid, color, geometrical, or hard edge painters, so there was a lot of talk about systems, modules, and mathematics as we met several times that fall to discuss the panel agenda.” [Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner, and Joyce Kozloff, “Pattern and Decoration,” in Patterns: Monstring (Odense: Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, 2000), p. 72.]

Then, in early January 1975, a small group convened in Robert Zakanitch’s studio. He and Miriam Schapiro, who had been teaching in California and had recently returned to New York, were talking to one another about pattern and decoration, and that was invigorating their painting. Robert invited painter Tony Robbin and critic Amy Goldin, who was struggling to find a language to address and describe non-Western and decorative arts. Miriam brought me. Two weeks later, there was a second gathering, to which Amy invited Bob Kushner and Kim MacConnel. I remember that they brought pieces of fabric with them and had already developed a close dialogue. We each recall those days differently, but there were two powerful subjects that wove through our discussions: a rejection of current art modes and an excitement in the discovery of other forms. Some had early memories that resonated deeply (Zakanitch’s grandmother’s wallpaper, Schapiro’s yard sales, and trips up and down the escalators at Bloomingdale’s). Tony had spent his childhood in Japan and Okinawa, and he lived in Iran for several years as a teenager, because his father worked as a lawyer for the U.S. government abroad. JK

Both Japan and Iran are cultures that have evolved and valued their own decorative traditions over centuries. These experiences of a foreign land, where two-dimensional pattern fills such an important place, were not lost on Tony. There may not have been an agreed-upon definition for the decorative, but each of us, following our individual paths, had stumbled on a manner of art making that was full of information and reference to other cultures; and we had abstracted statements about the varying complexity that we liked to look at. Tony Robbin was right in the middle of this dialogue. RK

After a long exchange, we named ourselves “Pattern and Decoration,” an unwieldy mouthful, but one that encompassed our disparate passions. Soon the meeting was larger, with twice as many participants from both “pattern” clusters, but there was such a variety of aesthetics and points of view that it was harder to find a common discourse. JK

The dialogue in those early days was heady and exciting. Many of us approached the decorative as an extension of a strongly fought feminist agenda, a celebration of the anonymity and sometimes desperate escapism of what had been called women’s work. Many had traveled abroad and seen work that inspired us to go home and replicate the complexity of that Mesoamerican carving, weaving, or wall decoration in our own paintings. RK

The Islamic wing opened at the Metropolitan Museum in 1975, and in 1976 the Smithsonian launched its decorative arts museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, in New York. We would rush to the many important shows of world ornament and discuss them at length. Tony was profoundly affected by Indian Painting at the Asia Society in 1968; A King’s Book of Kings at the Met in 1972; A Flower from Every Meadow, Indian Paintings from American Collections at Asia Society in 1973; and Four Centuries of Fashion: Classical Kimono from the Kyoto National Museum at the Japan Society in 1977. In the early 1970s, Tony and his wife, Rena Kosersky, collected quilts, which were still affordable then: they especially liked a wedding-ring quilt and another with a fan pattern. More significantly, they traveled to Mexico in 1970, where he witnessed the ingeniously varied bands of geometric stone patterns on the temples at Mitla; on a longer excursion to Japan during the summer of 1972, they saw lots of kimono and obi, woodblock prints, and Nara decoration. JK

Members of the group participated in several public panel discussions at the Artists Talk on Art series and another session at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, where there were heated arguments with artists in the audience. Our ideas had become controversial and timely. We soon had champions and detractors in the art press (besides Goldin, the champions included Jeff Perrone, Carrie Rickey, Carter Ratcliff, April Kingsley, and John Perreault). The first show, 10 Approaches to the Decorative, was curated by Jane Kaufman at the Alessandra Gallery in 1976, and Jeff Perrone wrote a thoughtful article about it in Artforum. He argued that there was not much commonality in the way the work looked, as we each truly approached the decorative separately, but we were connected by a desire to adapt decorative impulses into a contemporary art practice. RK and JK

From the beginning, Tony Robbin’s involvement with four-dimensional geometry was seen as a distinguishing feature. Perrone wrote: “This three-sectioned work is partially covered with a hexagon pattern filled in with sections of spotted spray paint. But the overall impression is of a deep, opaque, outer-space-like color range situated in the rust, dark and olive green range. It has outright illusionistic, receding geometric forms which are rendered in outline alone, and create ambiguous readings of the space. . . . .Robbin’s interest in illusion and ‘pleasure through visual complexity’ does not isolate him in this decoration show. For those artists using shiny materials, there is the illusion of light through reflection and the illusion of real jewels; there is the illusion of space defined by flat forms that are made ambiguous through segmentation; there is the illusion that is disguised allusion (original forms which look like traditional forms). . . .The illusion may occur in the eye, but it is neither manipulative, nor an end in itself.”JK [Jeff Perrone, “Approaching the Decorative,” Artforum (December 1976). P. 30]

A large, early survey of Pattern Painting at P.S. 1, curated by John Perreault in 1977, presented the full range of these strategies. A few of the braver gallerists showed our work. In those early years, Holly Solomon represented Robert Kushner, Robert Zakanitch, Valerie Jaudon, Ned Smyth, Kim MacConnel, and Brad Davis; Tibor de Nagy represented Richard Kalina and Joyce Kozloff and later Tony Robbin; Tony Alessandra represented Miriam Schapiro, Tony Robbin, and Jane Kaufman; and Pam Adler represented Cynthia Carlson and Barbara Zucker. JK and RK

Tony Robbin had come to those early meetings with a fully formed aesthetic, an infinitely expanding linear grid with three- and four-dimensional geometric references. His color sense, a series of jewel-like tones: amethyst, sapphire, turquoise accented with triangles and wedges of pure cadmium reds and yellows. The plane of his paintings glimmered and sparkled with textured areas of color. His aesthetic of more rather than less visual information fit right in with the general concerns of the entire group. While some of us talked about dollhouses, doilies, Islamic tessellation, and tribal weaving, Tony brought to the table his explorations in the cerebral world of fourth-dimensional mathematics. RK

Robbin’s interest in space dated back to his student years with Al Held, but he bent that macho aesthetic to incorporate flattened passages of tender, delicate pattern and orientalist undertones. He experimented with 3-D glasses and began to collaborate with engineers and scientists. The paintings expanded and pushed those shapes further and further, back and forth, and there was even a series in which wires extended out of them. In 1979 he wrote: “For two thousand years, over half of the globe, art has been pattern art. Pleasure of lyric color and calligraphy, whether expressed figuratively or geometrically, is intrinsic to the confidence gained in knowing the multiple, simultaneous structure. Omniattentive seeing—knowing space—may be a specific form of consciousness originating in a different and more powerful part of the brain than we usually use.”JK [Tony Robbin, “Patterned Space: The 2nd through the 4th Dimension,” exh. cat. (Jacksonville, FL: Art Sources Inc., 1979), inside front cover.]

We listened to each other, expanded our range of references, mildly disagreed at times, but the most important factor was that we were all on a quest: to change the art world, and perhaps the world at large for the better. RK

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I want gesture —any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture— gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gestures of space, soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. —Elaine de Kooning

In today’s pluralist, anything-goes art world, artists no longer voice the moral absolutes that they held sacred during modernism’s struggling years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: at the beginning of that period, abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky enjoined enlightened artists to “serve the development and refinement of the human soul” and “drag the heavy cartload of struggling humanity, getting stuck amid the stones, ever onward and upward”; near the end of it, Philip Guston returned to figuration from Abstract Expressionism and was condemned by colleagues for his esthetic betrayal

Fortunately, such battles are long over, and artists who work both representationally and abstractly, like the famously eclectic Gerhard Richter are seen, correctly, as, in Whitman’s words, “large [sensibilities] …contain[ing] multitudes.” Gina Werfel, a New Yorker who has taught at UC Davis for a decade, is best known for her landscape paintings, plein-air depictions of rural Maine, the Southwest, Yosemite, and, in recent years, Davis, a bedroom community near Sacramento built on former farmlands, that derive from a host of influences, from Mannerism (Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino are especial favorites) through modernism (Cézanne, Matisse, Diebenkorn, deKooning, et al.). These accomplished, eclectic paintings have been praised for their carefully observed and freely rendered evocations of place, but their abstract qualities were noted, too. Peter Frank (Gone West, John Natsoulas Gallery) pointed out Werfel’s interest “less in rendering landscapes of east and west than … in the abstract, intuited sensations of these spaces.” Victoria Dalkey wrote (“Nature Untamed,” The Sacramento Bee) that Werfel’s California landscapes “examine the clash between nature and man-made structures … as agricultural land is developed,” subsuming even tract homes, condos and McMansions into her lyrical vision, and that her abstractions suggested “water, foliage and floral motifs.” Mark Van Proyen descried an incipient dissolution of form in Werfel’s “evanescent atmospheres [that] seem almost interchangeable with elaborated topographies, almost as if the land were evaporating into the sky.” Robert Berlind (Art in America) saw the work as “travers[ing] the divide between representation and abstraction,” combining “a strong sense of place and its picturesque pleasures” with the purely pictorial pleasures of “an insouciant lightness of touch and a restrained, precisely pitched palette.” Kenneth Baker (The San Francisco Chronicle) enthused that Knights, an abstraction incorporating a childhood drawing by Werfel’s now-grown son, “leaves the eye glad to be awake in its time.”

In the spring of 2008, after three decades of painting onsite outdoors, Werfel decided to concentrate on the abstract elements and let her imagery emerge from the painting process. Clearly this shift was evolutionary, her transition from Renaissance windows on reality to depictions of artistic subjectivity aided by her habit of rotating the canvases sideways and upside-down to exploit the form-creating accidents of fluid paint. She selects subject matter that seems promising: “I may start with one of my son’s early drawings, but add forms from a plastic toy on my studio table, a Renaissance painting reproduction on my studio wall, or a segment of the landscape out my studio window or a remembered landscape element…There is not much nostalgia in my choice of these props, but rather a recognition of interesting forms within which reside some emotional residue and meaning… These props are no more than starting points, and after a certain point, I rotate the painting to dissolve the literal image and focus on what the painting dictates as next steps.” Her long study of and absorption in nature enables her to create, from sometimes unlikely sources, imagined parallel painterly worlds. “Improvisation is at the root of my practice—responses to the way a particular color or mark leads to another… Untethering myself from the demands of representation has allowed me to abandon the restrictions of a horizon line and naturalistic colors, and to explore without restraint some of the same issues that I had explored in landscape— dynamic, edgy movement, spatial complexity and atmospheric color and light… Speed, movement, gesture, allusions to the body and to landscape are all embedded in these paintings.”

The emotion that suffuses Werfel’s landscapes emanates from her abstractions as well. Alternating between jazzy calligraphy and serene mists of color, and often combining them, these works synthesize the gestural (Pollock, de Kooning) and colorist (Mark Rothko, Frankenthaler) wings of Abstract Expressionism. Fast Forward (2009), based on one of her son’s drawings of knights in combat, may be, due to its arduous creation, a symbol of struggle for Werfel, but its floral palette and floating calligraphy recall to viewers instead the semi-abstract arcadias of Kandinsky, Masson and Gorky. Headdress and Saddle, also deriving from her son’s drawings, similarly suggest nature transformed into symbols, while Collision (2010) does embody dramatic conflict and tension—de Kooning’s monumental abstraction, Excavation, sprung to coloristic life. More Asian and meditative in feeling are the more open compositions of Interlude (2009), Encounter (2008), and Cloak (2009). Werfel sees erasure as a form of mark-making, and likes leaving pentimenti, partial erasures, as suggestive, mysterious elements midway between source and metaphor, looking both back and forward, revealing their “complexity of references, and multi-layering of marks and forms. I want to retain the ghosts of previous decisions and retain the multiplicity of original sources.” These vaporous paintings with their ambiguous actors or hieroglyphs are landscapes of metamorphosis that reveal themselves to the long gaze rather than the quick scan. Baudelaire, in his poem, Correspondences, described Nature as a temple of living columns and a forest of symbols. Werfel’s works are poetic, even dreamlike, depictions of nature that emerge from the collaboration of the playful imagination and the disciplined eye and hand and attain their own reality.

“Persistence of vision” is the term for the brain’s acceptance of a succession of rapidly projected images —24 frames per second is the cinematic standard— as continuous motion. Paradoxically, it might also be applied to the enterprise of painting, which might, in this hectic digital age, seem anachronistic. In the long view, however, painted visions (and revisions) like Gina Werfel’s, reconciling real and imaginary, and embedding time and flux, will persist, renewing and transforming a tradition as old as humanity. Joan Mitchell, the Abstract Expressionist painter, characterized painting (along with photography) in a 1986 interview, fittingly, as “the only thing [art form] that is both continuous and still.”

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If the world exists to end up in a book, as the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé claimed, or as a bodiless image on a high resolution screen, as postmodernist theorists have advanced, then one of the artist’s preoccupations is how to read and understand a constantly changing, visually insistent, multitudinous world. In Margaret Lanzetta’s bold, graphic paintings, the artist weaves, jams together and recombines patterns and shadow images in order to understand their often-unacknowledged presence in our lives. We see them, but do not notice them. Derived from both the world she inhabits and the very different societies in which she has traveled and stayed for extended periods of time— Japan, India, Syria, etc— her vocabulary of silhouettes and symbolic motifs embraces the postmodern age and ancient cultures, both East and West. Her sources encompass Buddhism and stylized details of Islamic architecture; nature (plant forms) and machinery (gear wheels and cogs); ordered and disordered grids; patterns and repetitions of distinct organic or geometric structures; and abstract, decorative signs often rendered in industrial or printer’s saturated colors. Out of this plethora of diverse and competing languages, many of which are embedded so deeply in their respective cultures as to be taken for granted, Lanzetta fashions both a response and a commentary.

In some of the earliest works in this two decade survey exhibition (1990-2010), Lanzetta has woven rubber strips into elongated containers that are simultaneously organic and machine-like. Her weaving, wrapping or non-mechanical repetition of industrial materials in sculptures such as Arcanta Group (1991) and Long Sack (1990) connects her to the pioneering sculptor Eva Hesse (1936-1970), who led the way from Minimalism to Postminimalism. In Lanzetta’s case, it’s as if she wanted to gather things together, or repair things, as the act of wrapping implies, as well as make a vessel-like form that could hold different elements. Working primarily as a sculptor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the artist began moving from the three dimensional realm to the two dimensional realm around 1992 without sacrificing her involvement with physically repetitive, meditative processes such as stacking, layering and weaving. One of the impulses that prompted this development was Lanzetta’s strong desire to directly record physical imprints of the material world from which the sculptures emerged. To join the mechanical and organic in more extensive and meaningful ways, her insistent sculptural processes were transformed into stamping, rubbing and printing, first on seven foot and later ten foot long industrial Mylar panels that referenced not only the vertical scale of her sculptures, but also that of the human body. In Delivery (1993) and Syncopation (1994), two early paintings on Mylar, her vocabulary is effectively broadened with a more diverse range of materials and painting techniques. Materially, the use of rubber and Mylar prefigured concerns still central in Lanzetta’s work: specifically the intersection of nature and industry. Rubber, a natural substance transformed through galvanization, still retains the sheen and texture of animal hides, while the translucency of Mylar, a manufactured plastic, recalls fine calfskin vellum.

By combining a vocabulary derived from machine parts and surface textures of steel plates with floral patterns and architectural ornamentation, a grittiness emerges. It is as if modern technology and its often-deleterious effects have invaded paradise, which the floral patterns certainly recall. This is underscored through the forms she incorporates, as well as her use of intense, saturated color. The dark lotus floating near the center of Lotus (cayenne) (2005-06), for example, seems on some level to have succumbed to the effects of a poisonous world, while the overlay of rich black, flower-like machine parts in Signal Jumping, Black (2010) or It’s All Spiritual (2010) transform the decorative into something far-removed from paradise.

At the same time, recognizing that mutation is constantly pressuring and altering forms, particularly those that have migrated across different cultures and historical periods, the artist deploys a variety of means to transfer her vocabulary from one domain to another; including silkscreen, digital technology, traditional oil paint, enamel, acrylic, and even pigmented pulp as in the Brittle Spring series (1998-1999), a suite of unique pulp paintings created during a Workspace Residency Grant at the Dieu Donne Papermill.  Through these mechanical means of reproduction, combined with hands-on, textural applications of paint, the artist underscores the extent to which industrialization and postmodern technology have become pervasive influences on our environment and the way we view it. She acknowledges that we live in a world of media-images, enmeshed in relentless fields of visual information. Thus a question I believe the artist poses to the viewer as well as herself is whether mechanical repetition means the destruction of things done by hand or can the two be made to coexist constructively? There is a sense that the artist believes coexistence can occur, but recognizes that may not always happen.

Over the past twenty years, Lanzetta has gathered together a diverse vocabulary that enables her to construct multilayered works that evoke a host of narratives, none of which can be reduced to an overriding story. By this, I do not mean to imply that certain themes and preoccupations aren’t evident, because that isn’t the case. One constant theme reappearing is the sharp collision between the natural world and cultural production, with the understanding that humans have invested far too much belief in the artificial. Another theme, as previously advanced, is the conflict between modern technological advances and ancient traditions.

By enlarging and transforming flowers into bodiless silhouettes and placing them against a patterned background, as she does in series such as Cultural Instructions (2003-2004) and Company Paintings (2009), Lanzetta evokes the history of wallpaper as an inexpensive substitute for paintings; still-life paintings; the changing reality we inhabit, where plant life itself is becoming altered; black-and-white noir films of the forties and fifties, particularly those influenced by German Expressionism with their fondness for exaggerated lighting and elongated shadows; and the lingering effects of colonialism and unregulated industrialization on rural culture.

Conceived and completed after the artist’s six month Fulbright Research Fellowship to India and Syria in 2008, the Company Paintings series (2009) consists of twelve paintings in square format. Using a vocabulary of alternating bands and one plant motif, Lanzetta limited herself to using four silkscreens printed in different color combinations. Each painting is titled the name and telephone area code of a remote Indian town, such as Beed 0442. According to the artist, the title for the series “comes from the term for works commissioned by the East India Company to document India in the middle of the 18^th century.” A British corporation, originally chartered during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the East India Company monopolized trade between England and India for more than one hundred years; the commissioned paintings were meant to present the rosier side of colonialist history.

Lanzetta’s Company Paintings are stark and jarring, their artificial colors hard and often disorienting. The series can be divided into three groups: those that juxtapose a plant form against geometric bands; those that create the plant form outline using geometric bands, thus inverting the figure-ground relationship; and those only made up of different colored bands, horizontally stacked. By working with a limited number of silkscreens, the artist is able to discover unlikely combinations, as well as push herself into new territory.

In Howrah 0322, the orange, black and white bands diminish in size as they rise toward the top edge, suggesting an aerial perspective of a landscape of tilled fields, as well as an unstable image found on old-fashioned television sets. By evoking these diverse readings, the artist underscores the ongoing clash between modern technology and ancient traditions that pervade many non-Western cultures, without offering a clear resolution to a persistent problem.

In Jorhat 0376, the artist juxtaposes a yellowish-green silhouette of an oversized plant against a pattern of vertical, horizontal and diagonal pink and black bands. There is something disturbing and threatening about the combination of forms and colors, which initially might come across as a still life, generally a benign subject, but upon further reflection clearly is not. The plant extends beyond both the top and bottom edge, disorientating a sense of its actual size; the leaves seem too large, as if the plant has been feeding on hormones. For all their repetition, the pink and black bands lack a detectable order. Why are some bands diagonal and others horizontal?

Questions like these, which are addressed directly to what the viewer sees, lead to other questions. What initially seems like a familiar image becomes less so the longer we look.  In Jorhat 0376 and other paintings, such as Biophilia Eve (2007) and Last Two Million (2008), a spiky flower or benign houseplant becomes super-sized and menacing. I would characterize this as one of Lanzetta’s strengths— she can turn a familiar image strange, as well as transform what is perceived as elegant and decorative into something cold and threatening. This even persists, as with Howrah 0322, when the artist restricts herself to repeating geometric patterns. Again, in Karnal 0184, only horizontal bands of yellow, black and white are used. However, some bands are tilted, while a vertical band interrupts others, causing symmetry and asymmetry to collide. Order, it seems, has broken down, and disruption is unavoidable.

In Ballary 0839, the combination of plant-like shapes and geometric bands is pushed to an extreme, making it difficult to distinguish figure from ground. If anything, they keep exchanging roles: in one view we might conclude that the leaf-like shapes defined by black and white bands are in front of the yellowish-green leaf-like shapes filled with reddish-magenta leaf like shapes. However, this view reverses, and we can also believe that the yellowish-green leaf-like shapes are in front of the black-and white bands. The instability of the view becomes a comment on the subject—the inextricable embrace of form and content is troubling. In contrast to Bridget Riley and other artists involved with op art, Lanzetta recognizes that there is no pure state of seeing; everything is inflected by culture and history.

The clash between symmetry and asymmetry, order and disorder, underscores Lanzetta’s vision of reality as a struggle between two opposing forces made of the same, if not identical, stuff. In this sense, the artist undermines the sense of order and decorum normally associated with decorative and architectural patterns. She reminds us that the world has gone awry, and that there is no clear agreement on a resolution. We can neither restore the old order, nor determine how to create a new, widely beneficial order. Even the idea of progress is called into question.

Conflict, entropy, mutation are also not concepts we think of with regard to floral patterns or decorative motifs. Yet that is precisely what the viewer encounters in Lanzetta’s work.  In the Confection Series (2005-06), which “relates to the proposed deployment of US military bases, dubbed ‘lily pads’, throughout Central Asia and North Africa,” the artist mutates a lotus flower into exploding, cartoon-like forms, knowing that in actuality it grows in muddy water and rises above the surface to bloom, thus signifying in Buddhism rebirth and the purity of heart and mind. Clearly, another preoccupation of the artist is the devaluation of language and symbols. By transforming the lotus into an exploding form, the artist comments not only on external events over which she has no real control, but she also frames the viewer’s relationship to art.

In Lilypad Deployment I, (2006) jagged orange and yellow forms float above a stylized floral motif and an aerial view of a plan for an enclosed fortress. In Glassblower II, (2005), part of the Recitativo Series, a large, elegant magenta floral form stretches across a ground of yellow arabesques. Its translucency evokes both the glassblower’s breath and the fantastic shapes that molten glass can assume. Is art meant to be something pretty— a lush floral pattern, for example? Or can art insinuate itself into our lives, make us more aware of the world we inhabit? Rather than answering this question, and thus becoming ideological, the artist leaves it up to the viewer to decide what role art will play in her or his life.

Art, Lanzetta’s work advances, can offer many possibilities, as well as lead to many places. Her work of the past two decades is the record of a journey and a search, as well as a document of one’s passing through time and history. For all of its subjectivity, the work is neither inward and personal nor purely political. Rather, there is an openness to her work, motivated by an attempt to embrace the myriad networks and patterns of information saturating the contemporary world.

John Yau is a poet and critic living in New York.  His latest book is A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (DAP, Distributed Art Publishers, 2008). He has just completed a book, Glamourless Reality, which will be published in 2011 and is an Associate Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).

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