Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at the Whitney Museum of American Art

March 13 – June 28, 2020
99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington St. and 10th Ave
New York City, whitney.org

The exhibition of Agnes Pelton’s inwardly inspired paintings at the Whitney, “Desert Transcendentalist,” will inevitably be compared to the Guggenheim’s record-breaking Hilma af Klint show of last year. Both feminist pioneers were trained landscapists whose calling was mystical abstraction; both were neglected until Maurice Tuchman’s legendary 1986 exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – although the show included only one Pelton, and the fuse of her fame has been, like her paintings, a very slow burn. If you take af Klint at her word, she is simply the medium of the works she is celebrated for, a conundrum of authorship which only adds to her contemporaneity, her moment. Pelton is another matter. Her symbolic abstractions are hard-won and timeless, as impeccably composed and crafted as Renaissance nativities. Georgia O’Keeffe’s equally impeccable paintings have been the usual comparison – to the point of being an eclipsing doppelgänger. Indeed, O’Keeffe trained, a quarter century after Pelton, with the same modestly enlightened American landscapist, Arthur Wesley Dow; both were introduced to the Southwest by Mabel Dodge Luhan and her fabulous entourage, and both thereafter spent their lives painting in the desert – the one to immense popular and critical acclaim, the other in near anonymity.

After seeing the LACMA exhibition, I’d been intrigued by the occasional Pelton sighting in regional museums in the West, often in connection with the Transcendental Painting Group, founded in New Mexico in 1938 (Pelton was by then living in remote Cathedral City, CA, east of Palm Springs). She has been virtually unknown in New York, where she grew up and studied, and where she exhibited in the watershed 1913 Armory Show. The current show and its beautifully designed catalogue originated at the Phoenix Art Museum, where I happened to see it in 2019, increasing my knowledge of Pelton’s corpus by dozens of astonishing works, not a few of them rescued from thrift shops and garages.

Pelton, like many artists of her time (as the LACMA show reminded us), explored every alternative belief system that came her way, chief among them Theosophy, a kind of gateway drug to eastern mysticism and western hermeticism. She copied passages from esoteric texts into her journals and set up a proper meditation room in her studio, in which she seems to have contemplated her own paintings while summoning new visions. Perhaps some of these visions bog down in diagrammatic information, taking occult symbolism almost too literally. The urn which runneth over of Even Song (1934), for example, strikes me as received wisdom rather than firsthand insight, although the ethereal Deco calm of the overflow is transfixing. Memory (1937) has an even more complex schema to work through, albeit a more cryptic one; moreover, as with a number of Pelton’s works, it is almost too skillfully sweet, even cute. With its soft theatrical lighting and choreographic charm, the painting approximates a Disney storyboard. Of course, these qualms are, all the same, full-fledged fascinations.

The earliest and most sugary painting in the exhibition, Room Decoration in Purple and Gray (1917), is the epitome of a transitional work. For a decade, Pelton had been making what she called “imaginative paintings,” inspired by the enervated fin-de-siècle symbolism of Arthur B. Davies and others, in which mysterious, virginal waifs commune with nature. An earlier and murkier such painting, Vine Wood (1913), is reproduced in the catalogue; it was one of her Armory Show works, and the impact of Cubism and Orphism, first seen there by most Americans, is clearly manifest a few years later in the translucent chromatic planes and splintering plant forms of Room Decoration.

In 1921, after her mother’s death, Pelton retreated to a lonely Long Island windmill and painted her first abstractions, dispensing with the waifs while digging deeper into curving, overlapping constructions. With Radiance in 1929 Pelton perfected a fluid, biomorphic shell game in which light and space change places as you look. But with Star Gazer and Divinity Lotus, painted that same year, Pelton found her true voice: serene, tuned in, and heraldic. 

The artist was exhibiting in New York and elsewhere when, in 1931, she chose to move permanently to a village in the California desert, in near isolation from the art world, although closer to West Coast centers of eclecticism like Pasadena and Ojai. Her life among the locals in Cathedral City seems to have been about as passably sociable as O’Keeffe’s in Abiquiu, NM, although in more scorched and humble surroundings. As the last of her family money dried up, she sold landscapes and portraits to support herself (mostly uninspired, even dull, it must be said), while continuing to work on her soaring inward visions. 

As for that family money, it leads us to events before Pelton’s birth – a sensational prologue that might have been scripted by Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson. In prosperous, 1855 Brooklyn Heights, Agnes’s grandparents, the Tiltons, were joined in wedlock by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore Tilton was an editor and worked closely with Beecher, a spellbinding orator of national prominence, in the abolitionist cause, and after the Civil War in support of women’s suffrage. In 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confirmed to her spouse that she had been having an affair with the charismatic Beecher. Theodore reported the confession to the “free love” Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, with whom he had been having his own affair, and she publicized the behavior to call attention to Beecher’s hypocritical support of traditional marriage, with its legal and financial bondage of women. The scandal detonated in the burgeoning national press and burned continuously for years with endless claims and counterclaims.

Pelton’s grandparents got much the worst of it. Theodore lost a suit of adultery and exiled himself to Paris (eventually, he was buried next to the painter Jean-François Millet), while Elizabeth, shunned by society, raised their daughter, Florence, in genteel poverty. Florence, who had betrayed her mother’s affair to her father, was later sent to Germany to study music, where she married Mr. William Pelton. After moving around the continent for some years, the couple split, Florence rejoining her mother in Brooklyn with young Agnes in order to support the family by opening a music school. Mr. Pelton remained behind and died of a morphine overdose. Agnes was then nine. 

At age 14, Agnes, always described as quiet, enrolled in the study of art at Pratt Institute. The silent, solitary vocation she fixed upon and followed thereafter was a refuge from the whirlpool of politics, religion, and sex that had swallowed up her ancestors –– among whom we should reckon Beecher and Woodhull. His was an ecstatic, Transcendentalist version of Christianity; she was a practicing clairvoyant who summoned the dead. Thus, spirituality and spiritualism, forces writ large in the era, were particularly mingled in Pelton’s cultural DNA (and perhaps not just cultural, considering that Beecher was rumored to have fathered more than one of his congregants’ children). One last vignette from this prologue: in 1875, the same year as the adultery trial, Madame Helena Blavatsky founded, in New York, a mystical, post-Christian sect she called Theosophy, or divine knowledge. It was a syncretic, inward road map past the gross matter of the here and now, beyond mental shackles like Heaven and Hell, and it was destined to preside at the birth of modernist abstraction.

Pelton’s deeply moving 1933 painting The Primal Wing seems intended to answer the call of one indispensable Theosophist text, Thought-Forms. An illustrated tract by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater first published in 1901, the book asserts that thoughts can be seen by trained clairvoyants. Despite some silly and prudish moments, Thought-Forms opens the door for synesthetic speculations – especially with an epilogue of clouds visualizing the music of Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn. (Pelton’s 1950 premonition of a Lisa Yuskavage painting, Lost Music II, not on view but reproduced in the catalogue, is surely up this alley.) The pamphlet includes a color chart of auras, as well as illustrations of particular thought vibrations. Greed for drink is a grasping brown blob with cartoonish claws wrapping around an absent bottle – and fledgling Theosophists are warned to imagine how lustful thoughts would appear to advanced lodge members. 

With perhaps equal credulity, peace and protection appears as a pair of rose-colored wings, and Pelton’s The Primal Wing must have been suggested by this image – keeping in mind that the authors of Thought-Forms openly invited artistic license by acknowledging their illustrations’ limits. In Pelton’s unforgettable interpretation, peace and protection is a single incandescent rosy wing hovering over a slumbering gray landscape with the tragic grace of a Fra Angelico angel at a Crucifixion. 

Pelton consulted many doctrines, from the Agni Yoga promoted by Nicholas Roerich (whose phantasmal Tibetan landscapes seem to have influenced her dawn-and-dusk palette), to the aphorisms of Carl Jung (who might have noticed Pelton’s early paintings when he attended the Armory Show). Most of Pelton’s symbolism was so fundamental as to be beyond dogma; of stars, vessels, luminous orbs, and fire she was a seer on her own terms. Messengers (1932), with its buoyant, precision-tooled mystery can contend with any O’Keeffe steer skull or af Klint temple painting, any Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian, any Arthur Dove or Charles Burchfield or Marsden Hartley, or indeed any other spiritualist Twentieth Century work of art. I can say the same for Orbits (1934), Alchemy (1937-1939) and The Blest (1941) – as well as The Voice (1930) and White Fire (1930), two incredible paintings that are sorely missed in the exhibition (again, consult the catalogue). In each of these centered, delicately refined compositions Pelton presents us with something very like an icon for a new religion.

This religion has a distinctly feminist lineage – mysticism in the West being re-introduced by lionhearts like Woodhull, Madame Blavatsky and Besant, and patronized by trend-setters like Luhan. The feminine principle, as a Theosophist might say, had long been suppressed but was now re-emerging, and Pelton, for one, perfectly captures and distills it in works of devotion such as Messengers and Orbits. What makes these softly radiant visions unique is that they are actually chipped from diamond-hard philosopher’s stone. Her painterly sleight-of-hand transforms colored earth into sheer light and space. A gossamer 1931 work, Translation, is in every way the antipode of Jess’s alchemical Translations of the 1960s – those impossibly thick, yet precise paintings that seem imprinted by occult, perhaps demonic dimensions. But if Pelton’s beatific vision is not as literally thick as Jess’s, it is, in all its passionate naiveté, equally potent. The two artists might be halves of a whole, yin and yang, the good cop/bad cop of American visionaries.

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What with finessing the installation and a checklist of 41 artists (who are also editors, writers, interns and staff at artcritical and/or guest speakers on The Review Panel) I managed to forget to secure the services of a photographer. Luckily several guests had cell phones to hand, and extra shots have found their way to us via social media. An ad hoc arrangement which fits nicely with the collective and impromptu nature of the show.

Click on the photo below to launch the slideshow.

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LESLIE WAYNE: Your new paintings are terribly funny! How refreshing to bring humor into a canon so historically laden with gravitas. Particularly since the underlying themes of your work have always been deeply psychological (not that the human mind isn’t fodder for constant hilarity).

As I understand it, there are many members of your extended family who were in the mind trade. When I look at your work of the last 15 years, I can’t help but think about the impact of that personal history, subliminal or not, on the ideas that have consistently engaged you over time, the female personae, personhood, and identity as an individual artist within the wider membership of a tribe of artists and the art world. 

You’ve said that you love Freud. But the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious immediately comes to mind when I think about how your paintings, from the three-quarter female figures of 2005 to the young women artists in their studios, which you made between 2010 and 2012, have represented the idea of a collective identity within this tribe. In your current show, you have shifted from the female personae/artist as an archetype, to the self-portrait. You, the individual, an individuated artist, in her own studio. What prompted you to make that shift?

ELENA SISTO: My father is an aeronautical engineer, which has influenced me very much. My mother is a social worker and I had an aunt and uncle who were therapists and a cousin who is a psychiatrist. The conversation in my family was oddly “psychoanalytical” — not sure how accurate that term actually is for what went on – and intellectualized. Freudian concepts were thrown around rather recklessly, I’d say, in retrospect. Consequently I had to look up Uncle (because his name was invoked so often) Sigmund for myself in order to get an idea of what he was really about.

That family experience sent me and my work on a path progressing very purposefully away from the psychoanalytic towards emotionality and the pleasure of paint, a shift from above the neck to below the neck, so to speak. I really liked Freud’s writings, especially what he wrote about humor, loss and the uncanny. He was a warm human being, I think. I was interested in Jung’s ideas as well, especially the collective unconscious, but I he wasn’t so nice.

In the long-term view, the “Girl” or “Daughter” paintings and my last show of young women artists were the anomaly. I have mostly always painted autobiographically. Those two shows were about my daughter, Clara, and the insight that observing the process of her life gave me on my own experience of adolescence and young adulthood. I wanted to go back over that period and set some things straight for myself. I was comparing her experience to mine. But I also knew that the issues were ones many young women are involved with, balancing between the public and the private, self-consciousness and the need to be seen. The bottom line is that I always seem to work from what’s right under my nose.

Humor is a way of disrupting the current order of things, touching the emotional depths and coming back up to new possibilities. My father, the engineer, has a great, dry, sense of humor. It takes a minute to realize he’s made a joke and then you can’t believe how silly it is. He was able to slip in and break up the tyranny of the psychological, thankfully.

I’m glad you found them funny, by the way.

Yes, and they’re actually funny to me in the way that you describe your father being funny. They’re kind of sly. They sneak up on you and then they continue to tickle. The extreme close-ups feel like you’re saying, “Can you believe how great that is?” But I wonder also about your father’s being an engineer and how that’s influenced the way you think about your pictures as constructions. 

I’m glad you asked that.

There are three ways. First of all, an engineer is a designer. I can remember seeing my father sit in his chair at his desk thinking for hours and hours. Just thinking. And then swiftly writing down pages of numbers and formulas on a yellow pad, a completely foreign language, with sketches. The solitariness of the pursuit. The drawing. And the experimental approach to structures.

Second, his field was flutter, of airfoils and jet engines mostly, anticipating and dealing with turbulent airflow. To me the ideas of fluid mechanics have always seemed analogous to the movement of form and paint in the space of a picture: the effects of compression, expansion and temperature on flow, what happens when a passage of paint is squeezed by the forms on either side of it, or when those forms let up and allow expansion, rhythm, speed and momentum. Those things all relate to ideas of plasticity in painting and drawing. He doesn’t necessarily agree by the way.  But that’s ok.

Finally, the far out weirdness of some of his inventions, the willingness to really go out on a limb is like an artist.

Hmm. Cubism would be the most obvious analogy to an experimental approach to structures, and your work certainly takes many cues from that period of Modernism. Whereas your interest in the fluid mechanics of material feels completely Post-modern – a passion for the inherent thingness of paint and how it behaves as separate from the image. Using oil and water based paint together seems like a way for you to achieve a sensuality that is both mechanically challenging and delicious to behold, but never at the expense of the picture. In other words, your technique does not hold the image hostage to its materiality, which is hard to do. 

But let’s get back to the space in your paintings. Unlike standard Cubism, or say, reverse perspective in the works of Mernet Larsen and Scott Grodesky (both recently the subject of discussion over Facebook by two spaceshifters in their own work, David Brody and Alexi Worth) your space seems to come out of the flat world of cartoons. Your space is very shallow and in some cases feels like it’s pressed right up against the surface. In “Couch” it’s almost as if the space in the painting and all the objects in it, were painted originally in the round – literally bent around a tube – and then splayed out flat on a table. SPLAT! In “Splurt” the hand holding the paint tube (which itself has a picture of a hand holding a paint tube or some sort of jar on the front) and the paint that’s being squeezed out of it, have nowhere to go but right up against the camera lens. IN YOUR FACE! But in spite of the lack of room to move, your pictures feel neither aggressive nor claustrophobic. On the contrary, they are filled with light and air and joy, which I believe has a lot to do with your palette. Can you talk about that? 

Cubism has been quite important to me. I see it as the last great innovation in pictorial structure. The concepts of Cubism are extremely provocative. They open up a huge amount of freedom to paint what, where, how and when you want, not to mention painting what is otherwise unseen. I don’t think we’ve played this out yet by any means. Alexi is a great example of someone taking advantage of those freedoms, as are Carroll Dunham, Judith Linhares, Katherine Bradford, Tom Burckhardt, Elliot Green. Dana Schutz’s work has become very Cubist recently. I would say all these people are working in a classical Cubist painting space. It’s the imagery, the content and the authors that are different. They may disagree.

I don’t exactly think of my work as coming out of cartoon space or as flat, unless you are calling “compressed” “flat”. Because there’s flat “flat” too. I think of the space as compressed and the imagery influenced by cartoons. The Post Modern element is in the imagery.

And I think one of the best examples of the compression and expansion I was referring to would be Morandi. The rest you describe better than I probably could. But if you think of Morandi, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, Guston, they all were involved with these issues.

I do want my painting to move forward from the canvas and I feel like I am only beginning to understand color. It’s so powerful all on it’s own and there’s a great deal of emotion in it.

Getting away from the city makes all the difference. Where the air is cleaner, color is pure energy. In the city it seems to be more of an attribute of something else.

Everyone’s sense of color is so intuitive, even if they’ve studied color theory. I have a friend who has the weirdest palette and I finally asked him one day what he based his color choices on, and he told me that he was color blind to red. He saw all reds as grays. That’s an extreme case. But beyond the technical optics of color and light, there’s no denying the intense emotional power of color. I think color can function as a reflection of one’s internal make up and history as well. What’s bred in the bone. I never studied color, and so my color sensibility is completely informed by having grown up on the West Coast. The Pacific Ocean to me just seems to fill the sky with more lumens! So I understand how environment can deeply affect your work. So do you generally prefer to work upstate, or is this something specific to these new paintings? How does being in the country influence your process?

I love being upstate because I can forget about everything and just work. I feel like I am in love with where I am and I am working all the time up there even when I am not painting. People are more casual. There’s more elbowroom. I have great neighbors. Everything is good to look at. We’re surrounded by animals. The animals are intense! I can see things more clearly. I do need to bring the paintings down here for a little reality check. I can begin to believe they will make themselves up there or that everything is good. But most of the paintings in the show were painted up there at least in part.

Surprisingly, my dog and studio mate, Busby, prefers the NYC studio. Mostly because he has the perfect place to bask in the sun here and get rainbows scattered all over him, my little sybarite. I keep prisms in the windows everywhere.

Prominent in this group of new paintings are your hands — swatting flies, cradling Busby, clutching a bowl of salad while painting, squeezing out a tube of color, and of course, forever holding your brushes. Was that an intentional theme or did you just find yourself subliminally coming back to the one tool that forever connects your heart and mind to the muscle memory of making pictures?

I decided to crop in on the figure and lose the head for a while because the head implies consciousness and then suddenly the viewer is thinking about what the painting is thinking. The face can suck up all the meaning out of the rest of the picture and make it too specific. I want the painting to be about what I feel so I concentrate on other parts of the (my) body that are more available for identification. In fact, the plane is often completely identified with my body.

The hands function very much like the head without that extra degree of specificity, which can send the entire picture off in a narrative direction or turn the figure into an object. I don’t paint narrative. I’m much more interested in the emotionality, the abstract level of the work, the paint and light. That said, I am always trying to bring the head back in but in a more dynamic way. Or maybe I should say less dynamic.

They are amazingly successful at attaining a perfect tension between emotionality, conceptual rigor and technical light-footedness. Then there is the subject of the artist in her studio, which has been a subject of fascination for generations. How do you see your work in the context of that history? Or does it even matter to you?

Thank you! I totally see my work in that context and I keep it around me in the form of reproductions. I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to put into other people’s lives and what I have to offer. Since the studio is what I know best at this point, that is what I am painting. I think people are very interested in artists and artists are interested in each other. The different states of being in the studio, the sense of suspension and potential, making your own rules, the cooperation between forms, the ability to be your own best judge, the sensuality of it — how can you go wrong?

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January 22 to February 21, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York City, 212 714 9500

Mernet Larsen has been teasing us for a long while now with enigmatic, spatially-warped interiors: are they pure constructions or abstractions from daily life? Her bewitchingly plain, boxy people, the only possible inhabitants of such regimented spaces, are perhaps distant descendants of David Bomberg’s anxious Vorticist personages and Oskar Schlemmer’s utopian Bauhaus ones, as well as the lay figures of how-to-draw manuals and avatars in computer games. But they might not be as generic as they seem. Some have identifying features like beards and glasses that could hold keys to identity. Often their clarified, repressed gestures distill emotion. A recent show of Larsen’s paintings at the new downtown outpost of James Cohan Gallery staked a claim to conquered turf, freshly restating the terms of her practice. Clearly this lately minted star — it was the septuagenarian artist’s first show at a big-name New York gallery, and it sold out — is only just getting started.

One of the new paintings, Alphie (2015), substantially obeys what Larsen calls reverse perspective, her trademark disrupter of conventional pictorial space. This algorithm, in which objects get larger as they recede, is not easy to intuit. You can start by noting that normal perspective paintings, like Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (ca. 1455–1460), use the very same grid, with parallel lines converging to a point. But Larsen knows how to booby-trap this grid so that, should she choose, she could restore the scale of Piero’s famously upstaged man-god, relegated to the rear, to his rightful priority.

Larsen’s eccentric viewpoints, if plotted conventionally, would actually be closer to Ed Ruscha’s Standard station or a vertiginous Jack Kirby Fantastic Four panel than to centralized Renaissance mises-en-scène. In Alphie, a perfectly logical, if Marvel Comics view of a brick wall hung with a foreshortened portrait rises obliquely on the left of a cafeteria scene. We are looking dramatically up, and can even see a bit of the ceiling. Yet figures sitting at tables — the main subject — are rendered on the grid as if viewed from above, the liquid in a wine glass and a coffee cup attesting to this dissonant gravity with level calm. No matter what you tell your eyes to see, the mapping of up onto down, and thus near onto far, feels dizzying and uncanny, quite aside from the weird proximity of the portrait-hung brick wall’s “normal” space, which somehow seamlessly amalgamates with the rest.

Reverse perspective began to appear in Larsen’s already spatially disruptive compositions around 2007. Patches of the technique’s compelling illogic might be construed in Roman and Byzantine painting, and in the work of El Lissitzky (whom Larsen acknowledges as a source for many of the compositions here), as well as that of Josef Albers, M.C Escher, and Al Held. Larsen’s fully worked-through reverse projections, however, are unprecedented, aside from in the fascinating paintings of Scott Grodesky, who has also made powerful use of the device for many years. On the other hand, no space is ever quite global in Larsen’s world, and in the group of paintings shown at Cohan, the artist seemed at pains to display all the tricks up her sleeve.

Punch (2016) is a variation on the dining theme, an interior of five rather bored friends around a circular table. As in Alphie, the nearest figure is the smallest, but it’s more that he and his two neighbors go upside down, ceiling-wise, while the table above bends magically back into an alternate, isometric gestalt.

With Chainsawer and Bicyclist (2014) Larsen explores even fresher ground. The ostensible subject is a suburban idyll or, alternately, a horror film depending on how one resolves a visual pun. Saul Steinberg would stage incompatible incidents along a single horizontal line, casting it sequentially as a marine horizon, the upper edge of a viaduct, a laundry line hung with clothes, and so on across a dozen pages. Larsen’s humor here is more devilish. The woman with the chainsaw is ominously poised to sever the bare linear logic of the room that contains her, and which also functions as a roadside curb to the oncoming, plunging bicyclist. With fewer shading cues than usual, Larsen lets axial geometry rule; we infer the bike’s front wheel only from a straight black swath, as if the wheel happened to be pitched and yawed just so. The imperiled line under the teeth of the saw barely holds the woman’s and the cyclist’s disparate spatial worlds together. Should time begin to flow, the speeding saw teeth would cut this slender fulcrum like the string of a balloon.

Such tensely buoyant dynamics are the rule of the new paintings. At any rate, they seem airier than Larsen’s previous acrylic canvases, which regularly included zones of impasto. Her current textures — degrees of astringency — are, if not quite as delightful, all the more decisive. Freehand or ruled pencil lines, as always, get the last word along crucial edges of figures, furniture, and architecture; the steely graphite joins Larsen’s smartly shaded planes of color, where needed, into Superflat inlay. Further evidence of the gnarly intellect of the artist’s hand was seen in a number of careful studies, collaged and gridded-off for transfer.

Along with thinner paint quality comes a new lightness of spirit, even overt parody. At any rate, the subjects have emerged from the claustrophobic basements of academe­­ — seminar rooms, linoleum-tiled corridors — into the great outdoors. Frontier (2015) with its rifle-thin riflemen quotes Barnaby Furnas’s Civil War figures almost too closely, substituting for Furnas’s angular bloodbaths the liquefied, queasy undulations of a deforested landscape. Misstep (2015) doesn’t depict the accident of the title so much as it cartoons the crisis of graduation, wherein a sturdy man and woman are sequentially falling forward, lemming-like, from a pixilated Minecraft cliff. Or, if you prefer, they roll off the end of an assembly line into the unknown.

In opening up and broadening their horizons, it must be said that many of the new paintings relinquish the uniquely pressurized sensation characteristic of Larsen’s previous work. But Reading in Bed (2015), in compensation, takes the psychological remapping of space to a new level, by bringing us into the quotidian intimacy of a couple’s domestic blahs. The wrongness of scale is right at home in the brooding disconnect between enormous, watchful wife and diminishing, distracted husband. As with the best of Larsen’s twisted, inverted interiors, one finds oneself — rather in the manner of the film Being John Malkovich (1999) — passing impossibly to the inside of another person’s head.

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artcritical.com doesn’t aspire to be the journal of record when it comes to obituaries: we respond as any serious art magazine does when a giant leaves the field, but as in much of our coverage, the choice of artists and art world personalities to whom we pay tribute is determined less by editorial policy than by the passions of individual writers.  A case in point: two memorials posted today, May 7, honoring artists who fall short of a newspaper headline for reason of living quieter lives, chasing quirky visions, working at an obstinate scale or sheer consistent poor luck.  Longtime artcritical contributor David Brody offers a spirited reading of a painter of mythic, oddly iconic personages and a bestiary of their four-legged companions, Selina Trieff, who passed in January at the age of 81.  William Tucker, the legendary British-born sculptor, offers a fulsome, warm introduction, as it is for most of us, to his friend, James Adley, who also died recently at 83.  Besides the privilege of offering a platform to quality writing on subjects that matter to their authors, however, there is good journalistic sense in giving space to these overlooked individuals for the critical and historical insights their examined lives afford.  Mr. Tucker’s  quite detailed biographical sketch is riveting, for instance, on the subject of how American abstract painting galvanized certain British artists of his generation.   Like all good tributes, these offerings  impart a sense of relish at the persistence of the creative spirit.

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At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

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The painting and drawing practices of Alexander Ross, always in fundamental opposition, have increasingly been cross-pollinating. The paintings create photorealist illusions, and are thus, to a high degree, preordained. They are mappings of a kind, in which, in Caroll Dunham’s appreciative phrase, Ross “systematizes rendering as a conflation of sonar and paint-by-numbers.” The images they map are purpose-made glossy digital photo-collages of Plasticine sculptures, built in turn upon ideas in the drawings. As for the drawings themselves, they are pure inventions. They grow before our eyes. And if the synthetic atmosphere of the paintings can seem anaerobic (yet so viscously seductive that one willingly forswears oxygen), the drawings are earthy and florid, drawn as if by an ecstatic 19th-century Dr. Seuss looking through a microscope and reporting back from the microbial frontier. Simultaneous gallery shows in 2008 at David Nolan and Marianne Boesky showcased Ross’s drawings in relation to his then better-known paintings, emphatically revealing their opposition, but also their mediated interdependence as stages along a continuum. Think of Ross’s linkage of methods — drawing, painting, photography, digital manipulation, sculpture, and collage — as a fan belt designed to keep his mad-scientist ideas from overheating, to the point, as has often been noted, of post-human chilliness. But a thaw was evident as far back as those twin exhibitions of 2008. Hybrid drawing-photo works, graphically outlined paintings, and color-banded pencil illusions showed that Ross was in fact beginning to put drawing and painting procedures into direct contact, step by Gregor Mendel-like step.

The new work on view at David Nolan, a decade into these controlled experiments, exhibits full chromosomal exchange: the drawings are now essentially photorealistic, while the paintings invite graphic ideas into isolated Plasticene nodules and their increasingly open-ended backgrounds. Even more, the untitled paintings denoted (AR5072), (AR5073) and (AR5075) let drawing in from the beginning, where it lays down the law. Opting out of Ross’s previously inviolable figure/ground, sky/horizon convention, these unprecedented canvases offer soft frontal grids that can be carved into. This relief space is a revival of an established drawing motif, a vertical slice through cellular gray matter that exposes visceral pockets and interrupted ducts — rendered with Ross’s familiar low-bandwidth slime-o-realism. Yet, despite the sense of hidden rot or infestation thereby exposed, the tissue wall is soft and rounded, not a wound but a specimen cultured against laboratory glass, its graphic undulations blending smoothly, almost spongily, into photorealist punctures and cavities.

Normally at such border zones Ross lays it on thick, as in another hybrid canvas, (AR5232), which places a red trompe l’oeil fungal stalk abruptly against a backdrop version of the cell-wall motif, this one scrawled by oil stick into wet ground. In the context of Ross’s slow-boat methodology this loose sgrafitto is wildly Mattissean. But even so, it’s just another map-able asset, like the piled-up ridges of his fully photoreal passages. There, his meticulous sculpting of illusion owes equal amounts to the shifty self-consciousness of Gerhard Richter and the atelier positivism of Chuck Close. Or, going wide angle, we might take bearings on the viscid leafage of Thomas Cole and the encaustic hatchings on the maps and flags of Jasper Johns — the granddaddy and the grand Dada of American landscape. In that suspiciously empty wilderness, Ross may be our best contemporary guide.

The untitled paintings denoted (AR5233), (AR5234), and (AR5235) are far more typical of Ross’s exhaustive survey of a brave new world. They adhere to his longstanding if ceaselessly tweaked convention, mentioned above, of placing foreground figures against distant looming skies. Within this controlled environment he has been cataloguing “plastic life forms,” as he calls them, for some 20 years, as well as their degree of digital chunkiness, edge conditions, focal quality, and color spread. The startling twist in these new landscapes is that… well, actually, they aren’t landscapes at all, but faces. Or at any rate, Archimboldo-esque coagulations that insist on being read as faces. A couple of them sport genuinely fleshy tongues, though whether the tongues are human or amphibian or functionally attached is up for grabs. A half-dozen drawings on view also look back at the viewer, either as masks or dimly sentient beings, or maybe phantasms of a troubled mind. Some sport tongues that, as with those in the paintings, seem to have been ripped wriggling and wet from a higher life form. These new drawings closely follow Ross’s photorealistic painting procedures, though more atmospherically, by means of delicate, interfering layers of crayon color. At this moment the fan belt seems to be turning in reverse, as the paintings are driving the drawings.

As for the in-your-face faces: pareidoliac forms have always hovered a small step from cognition in the work, but here Ross takes a giant leap into the grotesque. No longer the objective bio-lab technician, the artist stands revealed as Victor Frankenstein. But will the stitched-together features in the new work come to life? Do they imply an embryonic — maybe even hostile ­­— intelligence?

From the evidence of the strangely goofy visages, there is little to worry about thus far. The Pugsley-and-Wednesday tongues notwithstanding, a preschool Jeff Koons might have Play-Dohed the blobbier ones among them. On the other hand, the most refined of the drawings, (AR5238), is creepily humanoid, its Plasticine skull sharpened to a Neolithic spear point. Protuberant horns and blades can be found in the face-conjuring paintings too, but here the heroic landscape scale evokes distant mountaintops as much as lethal body armor. (At 90 inches tall, one canvas is, I believe, Ross’s largest ever.) Still, the sense of scale is unsettled, and unsettling: the sharp peaks are preternaturally clear, and the over-exposed highlights glare forensically.

The more you look, the more pathogenic the paintings begin to feel, as if they might be dumb, deadly parasites whose incipient facial mimicry is evolving to penetrate the defenses of host organisms. If these repulsively seductive paintings feel unhealthy to view, that is no small accomplishment, and lesser artists would stop there. Ross, on the other hand, has just opened a Pandora’s Box of drawing ideas — new spaces, new structures — that the paintings now must pay attention to. Expect further mutations.

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When I went to David Brody’s show at the Boiler — the project space of Pierogi Gallery — I was at first nonplussed. Things would have been clearer if I had read the quote at the beginning of the projected animation, the main feature of his installation, which is taken from St. Teresa of Ávila: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at times into my heart, and did pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and leave me all on fire with the love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

My first impression was one of annoyance at how flat the piece looked compared to other 3D animations of Brody’s that I had seen, and that the yellow was too light to indicate shadows.

But as the deep breathing at the beginning of the film took its effect, relaxing my body into a meditative state, I soon saw this animation as absolutely flat and yet three-dimensional at the same time. I marveled at how Brody could stride that tightrope with such assuredness. “In the animation 8 Ecstasies,” he writes, “two longstanding pipe dreams of mine came together: making a moving drawing, and pushing uncanny correspondences between sound and image as far as possible.”

The soundtrack established itself right away as something really original. The music, by experimental video artist Zig Gron, who also has Hollywood credits to his name as a music editor, including all three of The Matrix films, is a vital component of this piece. Gron’s soundtrack went seamlessly with Brody’s animation, articulating the way the flat lines and three-dimensional ridges separated. A very sudden and drastic shift in the ridges was accompanied by the sound of an earthquake. Gron sampled obscure tunes I did not know that added appropriately exuberant joy to 8 Ecstasies. I came away at the end with the impression that I had seen a masterpiece.

Brody had met Gron when they were both students at CalArts in the 1980s. After viewing 8 Ecstasies I watched the time-lapse animation of his drawings; the animation was projected high up against a brick wall, while the drawings themselves were to be found in a foyer-like space at the Boiler’s entrance. Brody’s drawing constitutes a halfway mark between his paintings with their dense architectural allusions, on the one hand, and his straightedge renderings in black and white, to be found in his animations, on the other. There was something (ironically) unruly in the ruled lines and certainly the background was pure gesture. The time lapse of the drawing had the pure pleasure of ones I have seen of flowers speedily unfolding. I was fascinated to see how his drawings were made. (The drawings, printed in editions of 15, come on a thumb-drive of 8 Ecstasies inserted into their frame, as well as a video of that particular drawing being drawn.)

The untitled orange-red sculpture, a ziggurat construction suspended from the Boiler Room’s high ceiling veiled by draping swathes of bubble wrap, had an apparitional impact like seeing a ghost in a haunted house. I had never seen a sculpture by Brody before, and yet it immediately held the force of another masterpiece in his oeuvre. I should qualify this statement with the admission of not being especially devoted to his paintings, which hitherto has been his primary means of expression.

One other piece should be acknowledged as part of the production of this multi-media exhibition, the newsprint catalogue with a text by Nick Flynn titled [salvaged process notes for david brody’s 8 ecstasies]. Culled from Brody’s notes to 8 Ecstasies, Flynn’s piece reads as a stand-alone poem.

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Artist Matt Freedman’s written and drawn memoir, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal, is not your typical chronicle of illness and rehabilitation. Neither recovery drama nor tear-jerking tragedy, it’s instead nearer to comedy. Both the tone and the format are semi-comic, with fluid illustrations, diagrams, and panel-like sequences floating on waves of hand-written text. Sometimes Freedman’s drawings take the foreground, with words functioning as captions, but mostly text and image create a hybrid that is surprisingly seamless — and absolutely compelling, since his wit is always to the point, even in extremities of hellish pain, anxiety, or drugged oblivion. Equally sharp is his draftsmanship, honed by the self-imposed mission to fill four notebook pages a day during the two months in 2012 when he underwent intensifying radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the tongue, neck, and lungs.

If traditional illness narratives tend, understandably, to be lacking in humor, Freedman’s over-analytic mind cannot but go there, even with death looming. (The current health of the author, a beloved friend of this writer and many others, is thankfully vigorous, though still endangered.) At his first radiation treatment, with proton guns firing at his diseased throat, he smells the back of his tongue burning. “I’m cooking,” he realizes. The sting of the observation is eased by the cartoonish rendering of his prone head’s cross-section, a Dristan^® ad gone rogue. Similar images get more anatomically precise yet more gruesomely hilarious as the treatment progresses: razor blades, scissors, and swords through the tongue; a burn pattern on the skin resembling a map of Russia; stripes of loose flesh in his neck, “like from a hot pizza cheese burn.” Color appears rarely but to strong effect, primarily when felt-tip red is used as bitter punctuation to locate this widening gyre of pain. But when associative portals open onto vistas of memory Freedman can wield the same color like a fireballer’s change-up –– as when the number five (a parking stall at the hospital) recalls Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number, and thus a lush image of the Yankee Clipper kissing Marilyn Monroe’s flaming red lips.

“It’s remarkable what a trivial little person is revealed when everything is stripped away by drugs and pain and fear,” Freedman remarks. Sports trivia, at any rate, assert a weird priority in the book, with other hospital parking slots calling forth Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in ’41 or –– more borderline autistic –– Lyman Bostock’s .388 or Rob Deer’s 230 lifetime homeruns, each such jog of memory occasioning a fluent sketch of the player’s trading card apotheosis. Power hitters loom with similar iconic weight above Raymond Pettibon’s punk-erudite obsessions, although where Pettibon is occult, Freedman is communicative, leading us by the hand through the educational zig-zag of his thoughts.

Freedman has often played with academic mannerisms in his performances and collaborative instigations. They are absurd events, such as a recent conflation of the French Revolution and the U.S. Open tennis finals, re-enacted shot-by-shot in real time, with losers guillotined; or live lectures with an easel and Sharpie^®, covering obscure historical subjects, accompanied by a jazz drummer. Even in his primary medium, sculpture/installation, Freedman never loses touch with caricatural literalness, nor with a sense of pedagogical mission. His 2012 solo show at Valentine Gallery in Queens, “The Golem of Ridgewood,”included numerous papier-mâché props, some humble and some lavish. The bluntly beautiful, chromatically rich sculptures helped tell the true story of Jewish resistance to the Nazification of Ridgewood’s German immigrants during the early 1940s, a forgotten local history that Freedman utterly entangled with tall tales, myth, and farce.

Relatively Indolent is full of similar entanglements, side-trips from his daily accounts of inscrutable doctors and protocols. We travel backwards in time to harsh assessments of Freedman’s childhood self; and to the day he met his future wife after accidently cutting off his finger in a sculpture studio. (She drove him to the hospital.) We witness Hurricane Sandy through the lens of Freedman’s exile at a Boston hospital, sharing his frustration and guilt at having to focus narrowly on his own pain.

Still, the unprecedented ravages of Sandy call forth affectingly drawn montages, distilled from CNN videos and news photographs. Not only does Freedman’s utilitarian, seat-of-the-pants draftsmanship manage punchline humor and informational razzmatazz (as with the anatomical cut-aways), but it efficiently captures each of the five stages of grief. Crucially, the publisher’s preservation of the hand-written notebook text –– sometimes scrawled on a bus ride or under the effects of strong painkillers, but always legible –– slows the eye, just enough, from reading to looking. That allows Freedman’s resolutely unstylish drawings to sail past an initial repellency, while we learn to read his distinctive, sketchy line. Even as we become addicted, Freedman bears down, expanding his inky range and power, gaining confidence as the work progresses.

Throughout, Freedman records unsentimental self-evaluations, of his work, his thoughts, and his life. The book’s title refers to the slow but steady growth of his rare form of cancer, but “relatively indolent” also serves as a thematic self-assessment, especially as regards his career. Even as he wonders about his lack of focus and killer instinct, the title’s sardonic pun typifies Freedman’s relentless approach: to milk doubt, failure, and anxiety so as to transcend the pretensions of artistic ego and careerism. In all his activities, Freedman remains a truth teller and a joke teller, a principled dreamer in cynic’s clothing –– never more so than in this brilliantly honest and defiantly funny book.

Matt Freedman, Relatively Indolent But Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). 240 pages, illustrations, ISBN 978-1609805166. $24

The post Cancer, Chemo, Comedy: David Brody on Matt Freedman’s Cancer Treatment Journal appeared first on artcritical.

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David Brody, Karen Gover, and Ara Merjian join David Cohen to discuss Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks, Jim Lambie at Anton Kern, Suzanne McClelland at Sue Scott, and Katia Santibañez at Morgan Lehman.

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