The Canvas as a Field of Experience

CONSIDERING ART AS EXPERIENCE

50 Originals, Mounted:

The object is nothing more than the subjective extension of personal imagination. It is there where every individual spends a lifetime fabricating a personal simulacrum of a real that never existed. This imagination is a parallel world of an ‘other’, lost in a galaxy of signifiers. Flesh is truth, but it has no meaning, faces gaze out at the ‘other’: the difficult indignation of the masses. Fifty originals, mounted, are blinking flashes of half barked half whispered responses at what was already anticipated. There can never be a complete story because it may disrupt what has already gone on.

Pure subjectivity leads to amazement. Even if art is a lie, it is a true lie, true nonsense. There is nothing but art. Art is the life process edited or not, there is no substitute for the pain of rotting flesh. Enthusiasm dries up quickly enough when staring into the face of the ‘other’ is nothing but a metaphorical shell game, a weak attempt to obscure the stench of one’s own rotting flesh. Sobeit. And to gaze may do as much to help to understand as it does to obfuscate.

The unspeakable madness of life. Fire bringing heat, light, destruction. Regeneration through violence. The unending decay through which new life emerges. The unending redistribution of wealth. Hooded figures masquerade in this untimely and joy-less transaction. Secrets to preservation and growth are closely guarded by endless disguise, denial, marks etched in the sands of time. Pain and bloodstained re-marks. A text that does not reveal the secrets that were only unraveled from the reluctant hands of time. The river is visible and its contours relatively static even as its waters rush by. There can never be the same moment twice.

Porous substances close in upon themselves, dense formations crumble, liquid evaporates, sky turns dark. Yet the insatiable hunger for increase remains – as people push forward into the now. We all come so far just to be alone, only to be thrown back into a karmic battle of epic proportions. I do not see the material world. Blind to it I stand seizing, gripping locked in a storm tossed struggle against four foes, horsemen of the apocalypse. I am seer without vision. Voice without purpose. Believer without belief. Weaving phrases from a network of internal referents, just as the brush arranges pigment upon the canvas in relationship to itself. “I am the sun and the moon,” each person says to himself. Closed circuit linguistic hell.

Deeper paradox: “I am illusion to my own mind,” we say individually, to ourselves. After nothing follows anything. A caress on the cheek is from the fingers of a ghost. She whispers a melody. The melody is silence in disguise. Color masks light. Light is total chaos – hell-bent illusion. Gates to the other side are crowded with those who suffered violent death. I put on sentiments and emotions like wax on dreadlocks. “Total disarray of reason” is my other name, placeholder without place. No goal or destination, only various horrible, fatal, karmic instances seemingly without rhyme or reason. Cause and effect have become conflated and exaggerated beyond reason.

Art and concepts emerging from this event of life move into an abstract more painful and further dislocated than before. I commit my transgressions – on canvas (like Clyfford Styll) – finally free from dualism. Rising up like a stone pillar from the earth of the Canadian prairies. Here in the most abstract and un-nameable wastelands of the soul all voice and discourse cannot rise above the blizzards of experience.
The brush strokes on the canvas seem compacted, There seems to be no topic. The lines and ripples are agitated. Surfaces are disturbed and grainy. The colours are intrusive and abrasive. I feel at an end.

No theory satisfies me and even these very words seem to be in vain. There is only immediate experience, and in this awareness of the free fall, I begin to imagine disaster. There is no hope for art; it is nonsense. Others are discussing ‘culture’. Some concoct theory. I just pour the paint onto surfaces. The message is lost in the medium… deliberately? There never was (a message). Life has no message, it is a medium unto itself. Life itself is the meaning of life. We crave experience and the antithesis of experience simultaneously. There can never be a tomorrow. The public is an abstract notion.

I am no to the world’s yes. I never was modern. Without culture there is only ‘renegade’. There is no semiotic available for me to signify upon. The music of the world is a beacon. Colors are voices to the eye. They bear messages without meaning. They are both fact and value free. This is what I mean by the purely existential nature of my art. The meaning is trapped within the void of immediate experience. Outside voices fade, the inner ear of personal consciousness and autonomy remains open only when all other outside events fade. The existential moment of aesthetic expression is perishable; it cannot be stored. It is non-transferable, it cannot even be explained. There is no motive but its own, no message beyond the immediate, no ‘macro’. The art I create is a conceptual and emotional vacuum. There is no outside referent beyond the confines of the surface of the canvas. There is no sideline commentary or critical rhetoric that can capture or disseminate its meaning. As far as art is concerned, this whole venture is an utter failure.

Perhaps because of “all of this” I am reminded of the reality of abstract art in general. That perhaps “abstract art” per se is nothing more than “natural art,” of emptying oneself of all those thoughts of culture, politics, commerce. In other words, stated most baldly, abstract art is just the manifestation of one’s personal nonsense. But by that, by emptying out all that is public, we become full. The abstract is actually the most immediate of all events and there need not be any conscience or discourse or explanation. So this manuscript is an explanation of a non-explanation. The art itself will convey its own message and any critical or interpretive message is beyond its immediate scope. If ‘the medium is the message’ then all other attempts at making sense of art, such as posing ‘east’ against ‘west’ is totally erroneous, or misplaced at best. Art, the painting itself, stands for what it actually is, beyond words and beyond conversation. It is the epitome of the moment, it is the expression of that which cannot be expressed directly through other language systems. It is the immediate existential experience, without discourse. In fact, discourse itself may only be a very appropriate scapegoat for misplaced efforts at meaning making.

Silence. Less is more. It does not have to be difficult to abstain from lengthy academic conversations, and impossible literal interpretations. The painting does not have to “resemble a face” or appeal to other such ‘recognizable shapes’. It does not have to carry references to some mythical allegory or situate itself among countervailing political discourses. It does not have to be personally relevant. It can even forsake its own self-created systems of self-referential shapes, structures or textures. There is no narrative. The only event is the state of ongoing and continual arrival. “Here” cannot be described, it can only be denoted by what it is not. It has to be talked around. It is best described as a sort of continual renewal, a never-complete project of arrival. Artistic gestures of the plastic arts are simply the gestures of this renewal.

Art and Consciousness?

This may be bold to reach out to such cognitive buzzwords. Nevertheless, practicing abstract art is serious enough in its nonsense to warrant some attention to the ‘deconstruction’ of the ‘rational’ barriers we all construct in ourselves. False consciousness planted in the young psyche, at that tender age. The paradox of life is that by the time these illusions are broken, one is already well on in years, perhaps halfway through life. And by the time one has developed even more refined sensibilities, death has already arrived at the door. And this freedom of consciousness is non-transferable. It can be learned but not taught or sold or forced upon an ‘other’. It exists in abundance, but cannot be stored. It can be discussed and described but the only ones who will understand are the ones that don’t need to be told. The paradox of life is that it can be summarized in a nutshell, but it must be played out across lifetimes. It is near and far. We all live out some combination of the extremes of all possible behaviors without even knowing it. Every taboo has a repercussion. Every stroke of the pen soils the page.

The reality effect is not binding, but it is inevitable. It is simply the manner in which it manifests itself to the individual that varies. There must be an open door through which to move, to go beyond the simple gestures, to move toward deeper symbolism in the routine events of life. The hidden subtexts of life experience can be made to seem occult, pure vital life force, pleasure. The hidden subtexts of life become pages themselves upon which the even deeper subtexts are inscribed, the stone tablets upon which the book of life is written. Paintings, for the artist, are the pages of the book. And the abstract event of the most liquid of media, ink and paint, is played out in the conversation between pages. Each canvas is a reference to prior and future gestures (paintings). Therefore, no matter what the artist may portend to understand or intend to express, no matter what the artist may think he is stating, the message is actually far from complete, the gesture is far from the mark. The story is not yet written. Perhaps when Rothko ended his life with that razor, he imposed his own coda onto a monologue he thought he had drawn to a close. Perhaps it had really come to a coda but equally probable, it was simply that artist’s need to believe that there could actually be an end to the hermeneutic nightmare that was his life.

Better yet to abandon the whole project of “supposedly reaching out there to something else.” Abstract art should better yet be called primordial art because it reaches back, or down, or across to that original state of freedom. Wherever this is, the pre-conscious state of bliss we all are born with is slowly tracked upon with the grease and grime of social living, of insecurities, poorly thought out designs, misplaced intentions, regrets, false obligations, ambitions and developments. The thought-free restfulness of playful humans is undermined during the process of life. Without playfulness, how can there be art?

Restlessness on the Canvas:

What may have started out as playfulness, as a preconscious expression of the dreamscapes inside the imagination, quickly turn into dangerous and terrifying moments of tortured struggle. Surfaces begin to swim with brutal directness. In the collapse of the real there were no survivors, no honesty, no meaning, no truth. When this disaster struck, this metaphysical earthquake, no one was prepared. So sudden and so complete, no one even knew it had occurred. Just a huge void remained, filled with the comings and goings of people, tasks and obligations that took up where destiny finished. Fate, remorse and dignity too, have all failed. There are still reactions, however, so the painter today must still find excuses for the nothingness, the sheer and decadent waste of time and space. The painter must invent long and lengthy discourses on ‘humankind’ and ‘history’ or perhaps on ‘myth’ and ‘beauty’. Or perhaps on ‘religion’, or lack thereof. Or perhaps the painter will draw on the vestiges of prior civilizations – or distant ones – and whatever ‘great’ aesthetic, or mysterious iconography that has become accepted as ‘typical’ of that place or time. And these discourses, the lengthier they may be the more they come to resemble that profound silence, that uncomfortable lack of response that is the real answer to the question. So the deepest and most perfect role of the artist is total apathy. The urge to create, emanating from so deep in the meat, the flesh, the nervous system of the artist, has no charity. It eats away at relationships, it turns the artist against the society he imagines. It breeds deviant behaviors and causes aberrant habits. The creative fascination becomes a substitute for every tender emotion one may have ever felt. That utter obsession for surfaces breaks down all usual events of a ‘healthy’ lifestyle. The urge to create is a curse at best and bad manners at worst. At worst, I say, because at least bad manners can be punished or partially held in check.

The Business of Life:

Life for the artist is inconvenient. He walks against the currents of the usual culture. No matter how well educated, or how intelligent, he still fails to grasp the most basic rules for easy living. The artist makes everything more difficult for himself because he insists on examining discreet issues or events, transgressing, refusing, resisting and otherwise turning people upside down or against each other. The creative urge pushes an individual to do bizarre things, to pervert the ordinary and customary manner of transacting business and relationships. More painful still, all the while this is going on, the artist is perfectly aware that he ought to be easier on himself and others. This compulsion to create, to gaze upon surfaces, to read the occult texts inscribed upon them, or that he imagines inscribed, is a sort of hilarious nightmare that one cannot wake up from. As Samuel Beckett might say, “there is no way out.”

Peoples’ faces begin to reveal their deepest secrets, even from long distances. Surfaces such as walls and sidewalks – synthetic man-made surfaces – come alive and begin to swim, pulsate, ripple and breathe. Softer surfaces such as water, fabric, foliage, become absolutely treacherous in their complexity. The utterly mundane events of the day take on huge cosmic importance as the emotions travel all the way across the spectrum. Emotion eclipses and eventually totally destroys reason. And when this happens to an individual, it is not that it is deliberate, but rather, more like a consenting nod, letting oneself get away with a little too much, and then a little more until a new self entirely steps in and takes over. This ‘new self’, this ‘other’, is the actual individual, the original self that has always existed but lives out a secret dreamlike reality that is a luxury in a survival-ist social world. It is all kill, kill, kill, very risky indeed taking ordinary events and gestures and twisting them to its own purposes, using them to play out deep subconscious or pre-conscious symbolic gestures. And so painting itself can be seen as a sort of pretend, where seemingly random actions are later explained or compensated for by cryptic remarks or long, lengthy discourses. Painting is like the ghost writing of one possessed. All painters should be granted immunity from any social reprisals that may come about because of their actions. But artists will never really have a social role. They could never be so determined or so aware that they would actually take any social action. They live in isolation from each other and from themselves.

It is a fair criticism to regard abstract painting as ‘dabbling’ or scribbling or otherwise the gestures of untalented, untrained, and worthless workmanship. Sometimes, on the surface (which is all there is, surface) it seems that all there is, is paint, scattered across the canvas. The artist is eviscerated, soul spread out across a surface. It is as if the artist is screaming out, the words contained in the text box on the following page.

And so the viewer feels cheated and blurts out, “but what does it mean?” or, “but anyone can do that!” or, “so is that a face?” The artist may respond to such a scenario with any reaction including violence, to just walking away…. But to respond to the larger issue of which these probable statements are symptom shall be the topic of the next section.

Abstract Art:

Abstract art really exists outside of the canopy of bourgeoisie society. It is the independent reality that acts like an engine of truth. From 15th Century Italy on (and who knows for how long before that) art has been a lapdog of elite society, used to depict ideology, aesthetic, form, beauty and other false pretensions of that level of society. Art in the past has imposed upon the viewer a scene or an arrangement of familiar or recognizable objects and characters ‘involved’ with each other, and implicitly, with the viewer in some manner or another. And the way in which these objects and characters have been arranged remains rigid in tradition and ideology, or speaking more directly, the hand and the brush remain heavily
policed. The postures, the poses, the appropriation of still-life objects have more or less been very narrow
in scope. The presentation, nicely put, is subtle – but more actually, banal. The perspectives are unyielding and the overall tone is stifling, uncreative, rigid, standard. The apprentice trains under the heavy hand of a master who is, himself, nothing but a servant of the court, an advertiser, a sign painter for the power elite. At very least, the painter is a victim of taste culture. “Art,” predecessor to “media” – the be-all and end-all authority on culture, style, politics and in general, reality. The artist is a victim of the media influences that permeate social reality – that is, anything that greets the thinking self outside of a bare room, or the remote corners of the world’s deserts. As Baudrillard stripped the media of its ‘reality effect’ quite effectively and easily, there seems no reason to despair, that abstract art can step clear of itself as media, and return to expression as it seems right to be. In my opinion, abstract art could be seen as stepping down from the tower of authority – the authority of will, of history, of icons, of the public – as relaxing its grip on the Statement, on the Factual and on certain Re-presentations of things ‘real’. The lie of representation: creating something out of pigment, or from bits of digital impulses for that matter, and creating the illusion of something ‘real’, something that (might) actually exist “out there” somewhere. Abstract painting refuses re-presentational illusion, the project of disturbing the consciousness by pretending to offer a window, or mirror to some outside referent. Abstract painting refuses to signify in the literal sense of the word. Rather, abstract art has selected a radical, a truly revolutionary and amazing direction, offering a text that is to be read, slightly askance. Abstract painting deals with multiple possible floating signifiers. And there is no signified. A veritable Derridean garden where language, visual in this sense, no longer needs to carry along the baggage of its own fixed meanings. But rather, there is an extremely slippery slope of signifiers that carry the viewer well beyond the scope of the text inscribed upon the surface of that chaos-white canvas. Ultimate expression of nonsense: nothing!

So abstract painting requires to some degree a sense of responsibility, or at least determination on the part of the viewer. It is not freely available to the viewer, anymore, to instantly demand an explanation regarding what he sees. Never in five centuries has there been such a reversal! We, as a society, are unquestionably lazy in terms of vigilance. What we allow to uncritically enter our consciousness via the written, the illustrated, or basically by any media vehicle is unbounded. We sit riveted in front of whatever means of broadcast – screen, speaker – receiving what we believe or rather assume, to be actual, real or otherwise relevant and tangible in some distant place or time “out there.” And so those in charge of media broadcast – propaganda – are very reluctant to touch anything that might disrupt the reality effect. Special effects always try to imitate a real fictional or otherwise but at least anchored in a reality, or a projected reality that can believed as our collective imagination believes it should be imagined. To use media technology in a manner otherwise could potentially upset the illusion that the “map of the world is the territory” www.sccs.swarthmore.edu

People desperately seek representational security in abstract paintings. And it is not there. So, the next reaction is to totally refuse any effort, any interaction and to set the piece above the sofa, relegating it to the status of ‘fixture’, or ‘decoration’. To avoid both extremes requires a personal and psychological risk. For example, the Rorschach Test, where abstract ‘ink blots’ are used in a series of free association exercises. Forms, colors and textures can, with some effort on the part of the viewer, spark various associations that s/he has not previously and consciously entertained. For example consider the inkblot featured here, that seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to the late psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. This may be because of the contours of the image, or because of the viewers existing repertoire of visual associations, or because of the suggestions borne on this textual surface, or perhaps because of the caption, ‘Sigmund Freud’ that rides upon the surface of the image itself.

These associations may be any combination of cognitive and emotive events. On an even more developed level, the sense datum of an abstract piece may actually excite a visceral response as the colors, the canvas actually seem to breath, to pulsate, to glow.

A good piece has a presence, an aura. It is a free signifier of any number of occult subtexts. It can serve as a catalyst for any variation of personal revolutions. It is moving more, now into a total state of mayhem. Transgression: all regard for proper or moral obligations to the ‘standards’ of art or scholarship are being banished to the rubbish heap where they belong. Remaining is a primal effort to reach beyond the often clouded (and irrelevant) disagreements of the scholars and critics. Lately when I gaze at the images produced by of Impressionists or Kitsch ‘craftspeople’ I do not see landscapes or ‘cute figurines’ but merely scribblings, badly manifested brush strokes, and all-too-busy, crowded canvases that volunteer only one excuse for their bad technique: their ‘resemblance’ to nature. Even the frame smacks of a sexually frustrated housewife. Better yet, is it not, to indulge in a wide expanse of bold, rich color and texture, to express elemental and vigorous forms, broad brushstrokes and dramatic visual events! No matter how long this new and refreshing revolution may last, my gaze is clearly becoming sensitive to the brushstroke itself and not to the confusing, boring and distracting ‘subject matter’ of representational art, that for all intents and purposes is nothing more than a façade to disguise the poverty of composition.

That which should guide my hand and the brush it holds is the deep metaphysical issues of color, number, and sequence. So, especially elemental geometric forms (or conspicuous lack thereof) or various numerical progressions or relationships remain central issues in the composition. Representative artists often crowd out these very necessary relationships with too much color, too much paint, redundant brush strokes, incoherent and conflicting forms and so on. In many ways, Westerners in general or at least modernists, must come to a resolution, to seriously consider an answer to the question: “why all the complexity”? Why all the disgusting fetish for detail, excused by some lofty reference to an ‘ideal pursuit’, some unreachable perfection. There is a real need to pursue the immediate imperfection of a quotidian existence.

Raw form shapes decisions, making pragmatic solutions from immediate aesthetic situations – ones that must be faced during the immediate confrontations that will occur when facing the canvas during the process of painterly expression. There is no room for the imagined convenience of putting off compositional decisions. These decisions must be reacted to immediately, not reflected upon and referred to some later date.

Abstraction and Alienation

The face of the ‘other’ is a text that reveals much more than is sometimes comfortable enough to actually accept. Alienation: is that not what pure abstract art is really about? No outside environment, no people, no ‘other’ and no self and not even a topic. Abstraction becomes the ultimate denial – Spartan Mentalism – as a lifestyle. Social interactions seem shallow, and the artist’s lifestyle seems bleak outside of the canvas. Abstraction is the detour from life. Not even the built environment, decoration, seems relevant until after the point of the actual gesture. The artist mourns this state while insisting on remaining there, sometimes mourning. “Oh! What a pitiful world,” he says, “where those around me are trapped like rabbits by the oncoming glare of the headlights of ambition. Artistic expression stripped naked, evaluated in the light of charging economies of exchange and attention – use value – leaves me in a desert of loneliness.” That built environment and its decoration come into relevance only when the artist’s gestures, frozen upon the surface of the canvas, comes into the hands of economy

Admittedly, abstract art is decadent to some extent. Favoring what is ‘not’ over ‘what is’, ignoring the immediate practical tendencies of most people to maximize comfort and satisfaction over the monk-hood of painterly expression seems to be a self-indulgent luxury. The abstract artist seems to deny or at least ignore matters of real world significance, reducing all signs of the ‘other’ to matters of text. The world becomes a crowded mental space filled with the shadows of what the artist imagines to be the exterior notions of state, of religion, of media. There is no right and no wrong, although the two together combine against him as an insatiable mental pendulum in his pit of infinite contingency.

In the plastic arts, particularly the painterly medium, canvas and pigment (liquid color) collide in space. The pigment is caught by the canvas in its vertical or horizontal position, as a flat or crumpled plane. The colors spill out, taking shape, gaining mass, pooling together or running to the edges of the surface. The paints are sprayed, thrown, spread, by knife, brush, hand, or whatever is within reach. The artist spreads, agitates or forms shapes, however he will, among his various and numerable musings, intentions and ruminations.

The paint spills over surfaces while thoughts spill over the mind. Comings and goings of attention and cognitive spells, random associations, blazing personal insights that would be utterly meaningless if spoken aloud. How long can one keep up the painterly vigil? How many days and years can one address the canvas? How many people, places and things must be sacrificed in order to touch upon that zone of ineffable nothingness? Pluto: dark and remote and chilly regions of mind. Heart is there too, beating, but so cold. I intend to do this, regardless of the prize, of the sacrifice. Beyond this is really more of a terrible desperation, to do whatever the painter wants to do at the cost of bigger rewards. Is this self love, wanting more canvas, more wood, more paint? But there is a point of no return, when the price is already too great, when there are already too many casualties and too much evidence of what has been going on. The artist commits to going on until every canvas is filled, until every drop of life blood is spilled out onto that infinite surface, until there is no more interior. There can be no reality, no interior, only surfaces stained with blood.

An important thing about being an artist is to forget about context. Just forget about it and let go of any of those popular social discourses and associations you have become accustomed to taking at face value, as real. One must practice disassociation from all those popular media attractions and truth structures. It is not wrong to live the wreck of a life that the artist leads. In fact there are too many who have gone before, laying down the legacy of the artist as something both public and historical. The abstract goal and the alienation the artist feels go hand in hand, inevitable.

The Canvas

Sometimes shapes must collide – as if accidentally – and maybe those incidents are accidental. And these shapes sometimes seem to be running up against each other, with life and motion. Or, they must evoke a tension, as if hovering in space above the horizon-less backdrop. The pigment must run together without seeming muddy. Transitions between textures should not be too abrupt. What I mean, is they must not seem contrived. The brushstrokes should not be too visible, they should not eclipse the effect they were intended to create.

As an artist, it is easy to hate people. The time spent not painting (which is both necessary and yet impossible to avoid) becomes the time of ‘not doing’, the time-space of ‘absence’ or ‘negation.’ So this time is in some respects a time of resentment towards society in general for not better accommodating the role of the artist, and at the same time, revenge upon a dead wooden-like public too slow to catch these more subtle leanings. One must definitely give up a wide range of ambitions for this more impossible one. Video loops of odd, random scenarios of behavior keep going through my head. My mind wanders from one helix of sensorium to another, hyperreal texts of sublimated and bricolated subjects. Images, faces, gestures and situations crowd through my mindspace in an unceasing procession. Flashing in layers or linked in multiple nonlinear connections in my neural networks, they roll past my awareness like a kaleidoscope. I gaze at this endless mindscape diagonally, at an angle, not directly. I entertain thoughts in distraction, never directly. I approach the canvas sidelong. My gestures are occasional, not distinct.

To speak of ‘pure abstraction’ in the plastic arts finally becomes misleading. The art must be practical in situ, in some environmental context. In the longer and bigger picture, people are not living in a vacuum, and in spite of the dominating reality of the subject, and sad-but-true, it is only when that piece finally enters the currents of economy, that the individual finally becomes an artist. The canvas is a template between realities, between the real and the public real that may have never existed, but always exists in the economic present. But speaking to the fact of temporal priority, the reality of the economic present will never exist before it is ignored and vehemently denied. This denial is the necessary initiation of the abstract artist. Sense datum must be accepted by absolutely and totally opening the senses. Only then will things as shape, color and shadow reveal their true nature. Their visceral effects come to the senses un-buffered, primal manifestations in the modern.

Modernity: The Uprooted Self

Avoidance turns to outright hostility. The thinking self begins to approach action much more critically when the origins of social behavior become less-than-automatic. Instinct is the necessary survival mechanism we turn to when ‘reason’ or propriety or culture is realized as nothing more than a false front to the real self. Sometimes the ultimate regret seems to be that the face of the ‘other’ is really so distant and abstract. Insults and personal truths and event brutal attacks against the outside fail to verify the presence of tangible public.

For those uprooted from their culture and their place of origin, there has never been a better time in our imagined history to accept the fact that whatever roots remain in illusions of ‘culture’, ritual, language and ‘race’ fail to compensate for the modern freefall lifestyle of nation and corporation. The past is lost if it ever existed at all. Deep and prolonged meditations on one’s cultural roots fail before they begin. In the Modern, there is no return to innocence. Shrouded in another memory, the relics of a wrongly-perceived ‘then’ lingers in the present. Staring into the face of the ‘other’, we often dig for clues about identity. But identity comes to us in the present through the distorting filter of past others who have tried to transfer nothing but the remnants of an already remembered notion of what that identity is to this fresh text. Decisions and judgements made in the ‘now’ are more difficult, or rather, less necessary since ‘now’ rather quickly slips into ‘not-now’. The past is not meant to be a fetish, neither is culture (a synonym for ‘past’). The past is already over and it immediately disappears behind the veil of retrospective, the distorting effects of immediate events. Retrospection is a kind of hell, like Tantalus, who reached eternally for things that remained constantly just out of reach. Events slide by and looking forward or back eternally remain as events of the present.

THE CANVAS AS A FIELD OF EXPERIENCE

The Canvas as a Mirror.

The canvas is a mirror to the soul that perceives it. Although it is nothing beyond a surface, it still contains. It offers depthless layers of meaning and substance. The painterly gesture imbues in it a manifestation of the soul. Pursuing much more than image, the canvas is a meditation for the painter as well as for the ‘other’, who ultimately must be the viewer. The canvas contains the gesture of the artist, his manifestation of himself and his experience as a human being. The substance, the support, the accoutrements are all part and parcel of the painting discipline.

The canvas is a sort of life force. It is political because of its very existence. It is cumbersome and it consumes, or rather, occupies space. It obstructs if one is not prepared to deal with its presence. The canvas should not be simply hung on the wall.

The subject matter, the particular forms that are situated upon the canvas are not particularly important. Rather, the gestures the colors, the texture and the style manifest the thoughts and emotions and the general predicament of the artist who painted them. The real subject of an artist’s work is never totally manifested, but it is partially exposed to view in the collective whole of his works.

The artist expresses himself more honestly and completely than any other because he does so indirectly and incidentally. The artist is a text that is read only through the lens of the canvas. The artist manifests himself through his creations. He is involved in the politics of style because of his very own efforts at expression. Taste culture is manufactured by individual events on the one hand and by the power of the larger economies of state, and the corporation. Taste culture is a ‘truth’ project.

What is really going on here, is that instead of allowing myself to follow a preconceived notion through to its anticipated conclusion, I reconsider its direction after, and in light of the immediately completed thought-sequence. This might be called “writing by the previously read,” or by the “once delayed conversation with self.” By writing, I mean the inscription of marks upon a surface, and this could be the gestures made upon a canvas as much as it could be words on a page. The first utterance becomes text, second utterance is response to that text, and itself immediately becomes text. Text by this process grows with the weight of its own inertia. These instances of utterance-become-text must be understood not as utterance, or thought, or speech, but as that which is written. Others should admit to this process and combined it would be this that is called “the automatic writing of the world” or the “process by which illusions of text become substitutes for reality.” The mind is so susceptible to these inscriptions. They run across the page, they occasionally seem to hover as if floating above the surface where they were first inscribed. People recoil at the words which are not fastened securely upon a surface. As if, hovering in mid air, these shapes, these ideographs might spring into life. They are already threatening enough, tiny simulacra of cognitions and of affects. They seem to hold a life presence of their own, because they spring from the cradle of thought, created by us, outcome of the conscious experience. Through time unremembered these manifestations have evolved, differently in different places and times, but holding to some kind of universal pattern. We can learn more than one variation of the written language, and by reading, and reading eternally and never-endingly reaching toward the pure thought from where those languages came. This never-ending approach is itself a kind of ecstasy, the sustained postponement of the ‘name of god’.

Abstracting from language the artist tries to find his own varieties of expression. He reaches for some kind of a more profound or more obscure utterance. He inscribes some other kind of text upon the fibers of the canvas surface. This language has no key, no syntax, grammar or vocabulary that can be totally deciphered. The various marks or strokes bear no particular significance. Each stands, or occupies space in relationship to the others. Together they maintain a fatal companionship, each defined by the tension of their only partially revealed totality. It is their sum that serves as a catalyst that initiates a visceral reaction in the reader or the viewer, the never-fulfilled promise of total disclosure. The one that views the abstract art has the responsibility of deciphering what s/he vaguely suspects is being signified upon the surface of the canvas. There may be some subdued aesthetic event, or reaction. Perhaps the viewer (reader) will wonder about what it would be like to be able to totally decode the text. More than likely the viewer, like an illiterate reader, will rest in the reassurance that someone must know the meaning and that the effort it would take to be able to recognize the significance is impossible because its meanings belong to a realm of privileged or secret knowledge. Ah! The irony, that those meanings stand stark, naked and blatantly clear, yet it stands waiting out of reach.

How does one become literate in the texts made by artists? Just as the apprentice never studies, yet learns, so the viewer never finds the code, yet reads. The relation between canvas and consciousness develops through time. Perhaps the painting should never be studied. It should occupy a subtle space in the repeating cycles of daily existence. It is seen indirectly; it is glanced at during a conversation, gazed at while in thought. The events on the canvas become a meaning-making vehicle for life experience. It travels through time as it greets the new moods and events of each passing day. It is seen consciously or indirectly as layers of situations, conversations, realizations and ruminations collect upon the surface of the brain and they borrow the rhythms and configurations of that oft-glanced at canvas.

The artistic expression comes out in waves. It pours over the canvas. It splatters, drips and beads up in patterns. The patterns extend from the centre outwards. The slightest influence upon the nervous system is registered. The canvas is a Geiger counter. It is a seismograph. Changes of place and habit affect the flesh, the meat that envelops the nervous system, highly erratic in the first place. Colors and light, and the acoustics of space affect in turn the inner space of the individual’s reality. This is in turn reflected by the canvas as we play out the events of consciousness upon that surface. The canvas bears the sound of one hand clapping.

Regarding the Dualism of the Artist

The artist must first admit finally and irrevocably the divided self. There is a polar relationship within the artist as well as between the artist and the canvas upon which he reflects himself. Instead of perceiving these polar relationships as antagonistic, they must be understood as relational and inevitable. These contrasting extremes on the personal continuum are mutually defining. Sophisticated attempts at deconstructing these points or negotiating, or trying to accommodate one into the other will fail. Admission, compromise and total dissolution is an equally unlikely solution to the definition of self. The pure raw metabolism of existence seems to be less of a solution than it is a failure to negotiate the metaphysics of consciousness that is equally important to the life experience.

The artist may try to negotiate the duality of his consciousness by constructing an interaction between two canvases, each reflecting one extreme of his experience in relation to the other. There two separate panels complete each other vertically. They do not rest side by side, co-existent. Rather, there is a hierarchical relationship where one dominates the other, because the higher must rest upon the lower. This is a vertical power relationship and it is more visually satisfying, because the total surface area is greater than the area of one canvas. In relationship to its other, it gains mass, weight, authority. It gains a voice through that authority, enough strength to utter a complete and self-contained message. One has to stand upon the other. Relationships of two are relationships of power/dominance, but it is through this hierarchy that the sum of each of the two parts exceeds that of each, individually. In these cases there is also a third space, a field of articulation that connects the two parts. This space serves as a template and although it si nothing particular in itself, as a border it divides and connects the individuality of the parts making them a connected whole.

There is a second resolution to the duality of the artist as it is represented through the painterly gesture. This second resolution is not a hierarchical relationship like the previous, where the boundaries of the canvas serve to divide as much as they do to connect. In this reconciliation, the boundaries of the canvas, the frame and the three dimensional space in which they exist do not define the relationship. In this second reconciliation, the dualism is in the mind of the painter and later it remains to be seen by others. This is the relationship between human intellect and emotion, and the primal environment from which it comes. This environment, this imagined place contains all actors and all events that take place during the relationship, that is, during the event-interaction. The primal environment exists as long as the event-interaction and ceases to exist as soon as the relationship is concluded. The conceptual event, the “Signifier of Human Intellect and Emotion,” is marked by the shred of canvas, the natural found objects, the things that the thinking and feeling actor has chosen to construct, manipulate or otherwise select as the key focal point, or the object of intervention. This becomes the symbol of a subject that is introduced to an environment for which it is intended to have an event-interaction with.

Prior to the birth of the Object (its material creation and construction) is another series of events. Through the prolonged repetition of the creative process, the artist as a thinking and feeling subject learns to intellectually and emotionally objectify his condition. This objectification is purely subjective because he takes, for his whole field of perception, the landscape of this personal consciousness. This is an arena over which he has total autonomy, as no other can be so completely involved. This autonomy is not a fixed truth. It is invariably subject to the influences of information media such as literature, popular press, television and institutions of social control. So even this landscape of personal consciousness is objective in the sense that it can be perceived outside of or at least in addition to the perception of self as a pure primordial life force. The birth of the landscape of personal consciousness occurs gradually and continually and can be understood as the ongoing union of self as self and self as other.

The union of the artist’s hand and the raw, elemental, undiluted, unbiased, meaning and purpose free materials is the third resolution of the artist’s duality. Whereas the unions of the artist’s own landscape of personal consciousness takes place inside, its effects are recorded in the material world. Liquid pigment, horsemen of light, take shape upon the surfaces of the primordial purity of the chaos-white canvas. That pigment take shapes that suggest objects that in turn seem to take up space without specifically taking on a function. They simply contain and separate fields of surface upon the ultimate surface that is the canvas. This material union turns the effervescent thoughts that take place in the landscape of personal consciousness into artifacts of the nervous system. Time, great provider, is confronted and the once momentary impulses of the mind are frozen and preserved in the material world. In other words, time itself is deepened, because the metaphysical event, once totally ephemeral, is made object and concrete and available to re-visit and re-consider. Further scenarios become possible at the crossroads between deepening layers of the preserved and the newly re-considered. These objects born from the union of the subject and the material world become vessels of thought and feeling, monuments of the soul. They catalyze even deeper metaphorical events because they show the mind to itself.

The birth of the object cheats time by deepening it. The surface is a container for the text of the mind, the mirror to the soul that perceives it. This text signifies indeterminately but constantly and inexhaustibly. This text, like all objects must eventually concede to the ultimate ratification of the subjective experience.

The thin membrane between what was imagined and what is, is the relationship between mind and the outside world. They are never totally independent. And this thin membrane must exist in order to separate self from other while simultaneously keeping them in relationship. That which was once imagined, or even that which is prior to imagination can, through events, through the layered investigation of the world’s manifold bodies and properties, through the employment of skills learned only be being in the world, these events become material manifestations. They are born from the subjective and fleeting notion and become an object in material space. This is the union of artist and public.

And then these objects, free at last in material space become again subjects cast adrift in economies of exchange and attention, involved independently in their own incidents of event-interaction. The canvas or other constructions enter various staged and incidental situations. The artifact (a surface that bears the texts of the landscape of the artist’s personal consciousness) stands alone, unattended, unaccompanied and unexplained in relationship to its primal environment. Standing or hanging, it is extended by its surroundings. The video camera produces both a fixture and a process. The screen that presents the objects of the camera’s attention is a fixture, an unmoving and unblinking blind glass eye. Yet the perpetual movement betrays its illusion of immobility, results of the endless parade of magnetic strip that hover on the face of the screen. These movements simulate the movements that once were, in the material world and now parade across the gentle curve of the immobile screen. The presence of the screen offers a new subjectivity of once-removed incidents of event-interactions. Once again subjectivity is transcended by means of objectification. In the material world of the primal environment the object created from the imaginations of the autonomous intellect must survive or fail. It is marked by its surroundings and by the changes of time. One cannot step into the same river twice, but one can observe the same surface, the same text many times even if its components are in perpetual motion. The canvas rots, as does the flesh, even if it does so imperceptibly.

Even so, the object is eternal in its countless outward manifestations in space and in time. Likewise the landscape of a man’s consciousness is infinite, if not in its immediacy, then in its countless and incessant manifestations and constant re-evaluations. There is no end to the Idea. The movement of forgetfulness or restlessness or the discovery of a previously unnoticed detail of significance too easily replaces despair. The object of one’s own device extends him as much as it extends ‘others’. Through the lens of each one’s own subjectivity, the object lives as a catalyst for the public economy of Ideas.

As long as this perceiving self can go on, perceiving, then there is no room for the Void. Stillness is the uneventful collapse of significance, it comes with the end of the conversation. Signify! And manifest the landscape of your consciousness to the primal environment of the world.

The Canvas as a Field of Experience.

I see the canvas more and more as a field of experience. It is a surface where life events are registered. The artist’s intention, while itself vast and incommunicable, is nevertheless evidenced by the amount of energy he invests in the canvas. Or otherwise stated, the artist must demonstrate his resolve to engage his intentions through painterly habits. The artist demonstrates his vast, ineffable intention through his lifestyle. The art, the outcome, the material consequences of his actions are only side effects. The artist lives as an artist, one totally in relationship to the canvas as a field of experience.

The artist is guilty of being a voyeur. The canvas surface is the mirror that reflects his consciousness back at him. He lives his life trapped by his own gaze. Identically, he lives his life fascinated by that indirect reflection on the canvas. He is watcher and watched. He is subject and object simultaneous. The canvas, field of experience, is the central feature of the artist’s life. This is both tragic and inevitable.

All life events exterior to this embrace eventually come to be registered there. When the artist is not painting, he is thinking about what was painted, or what will be, or what this current moment will eventually bring to the canvas. Actually, he is not even concerned with what was painted, but how those painterly events emerged. This situation, this intimate relationship between the artist and himself, the painting subject and its painted object, is not a contract, it is not a choice that is outright and determined. It is more of a dilemma, or a consequence.

The artist must first introduce himself to his medium. I speak, in this most immediate case of my own experience, my own medium. And so I speak of that instance when the muse finally disclosed the subtler discourse. No matter how long the painting has gone on, there must finally be an epiphany. It not, the painter remains a painter, never to be an artist. That epiphany (is it?) is marked as a moment where ‘before’ and ‘after’ articulate. It is, as if the painter has cast a spell. He has conjured up a muse, a djinn that will never let him go. He will never be the same. He will commit corrupt and perverse acts. He will transgress. He will be drawn into the swamps of his own unconsciousness, up to the lone peaks of extreme ideas, madness. In those places the muse shows him universal moments of the human condition. It is so personal, yet ultimately public. The artist is forced to reveal the entire field of his life event.

Upon the canvas, he registers the gestures of his experience. And these gestures become his life experience. And as these gestures play out upon their surface, the canvas, the event becomes, itself, the totality of his field of experience. It is a tragedy.

As the cycles of life experience deepen with time, so does its reflection. The artist recognizes the reflection of his own consciousness there, within the boundaries of the canvas.

His hand reaches out to touch the reflection, but like Narcissus, is trapped by his own gaze shining back at him. His fingers, his brushes, reach out to touch but the vision is disturbed by the ripples that roll across the surface. He struggles to catch it once and for all. With each new canvas he tries again to reach the final, pure essence of himself. He is plagued with a compulsion to perfectly represent his own conscious experience as a total, integrated, global completion.

This can never happen. Each attempt leaves only the residue of life events. Each attempt contains the sum of all previous, while totally digressing. Each attempt returns as a catalyst both building and destroying the integrity of the artist’s consciousness. He moves into each new attempt. It manifests itself as the deepening of experience. Cycles of life return us to the events that have already transpired via new conditions that seem to only echo those already remembered.

As life unfolds, we move further and further from immediate experience. Life events become only metaphors of those previously remembered. Each new relationship reminds us of the prior and we try to resolve the past through the scapegoats of the present. That prior event as remembered, is actually the sediment of its every cycle, settled into a meta-event, the accumulated and Ideal construction of a Universal Prior Event Already Remembered. Each new version seems to only be a proxy, another opportunity, to once-and-for-all summarize and resolve. And, then, this new version too, slips away and settles: another layer of Remembered Experience.

So no experience anymore, is pure. All of it plagued by what is already there, in the remembered past. The present becomes a surface upon which the past is reconciled. There is no future. The deepening of life experience through time is something recognized by the artist. He sees the irony, that yes, you can – will – must, reconcile the past, as you remember it, but it will cost you everything. We all must, then, sacrifice the present for the memory of the past. We are true to no one, slaves to a remembered past.

The artist remembers his life events in his embrace. He, transfixed by his own gaze, remains opposed to the canvas. His vast ineffable intention compels him to engage his consciousness through the proxy of the canvas. He registers that engagement. In so doing, he remembers every prior attempt.

The artist leaves a map of is life-consciousness, its evolution inscribed upon the canvas. These discarded canvases leave a trace of his field of life events.

The process of expression begins when the artist searches his field of experience, the canvas, for a signifier. He looks for an isolated figure, an image-event that signifies the epitome of his intention at that moment. Through his gestures that signifier is captured, frozen. And it can then reflect its counterpart, within the artist. And as soon as this occurs, it is already too late, obsolete, not even satisfactory. As soon as it appears, it is surpassed. As soon as it is recognized, it is dismissed, as the artist is swept along by the currents of time and experience.

The next level of expression requires the artist to try to see past the surface: through it, beyond it. He creates ornate scenarios, weaves illusions of depth and perspective. Sometimes he re-creates the imaginary worlds of his imagination, and goes to there, escaping himself by going deep into himself. He tries, in vain, to break the surface of the canvas, hoping there is more beyond it, that there is depth, that there is substance. That there must be content, there must be dimension. How can the vast infinity of life events and the consciousness that marks them be no more than a surface? This terrible tragic reality of life is too insistent. The brutal canvas is ceaseless in its reflecting vigilance. The artist cannot escape himself no matter how intense the desire. Endless gazing, beating into him the reality of the surface. The irrevocable and endless surface. The eternal surface. All events and all belief inscribed upon the surface. Every moment every action manifest by the incessant surfaces that bear them.

At the third moment, the artist re-turns to the surface of the canvas, deepened. What reflects back is new, aware, scarred. He can never go back to belief. He will never again find a discrete signifier of his intention. There are no more enclaves, no more little rooms in his imagination. They are now flat, each surface scrawled a text of terrifying madness. He re-turns to the surface of the canvas, deepened. He sees himself as a situation, always tethered to his own prison of memory-events.

There are now three avenues on which the artist can travel. He understands now that his being is enveloped in his situations. And this endless procession of events, of situations, brings him along through Karmic cycles of ever-deepening events.

He gazes back at himself now, and sees directions – lines of force and fields of tension – in continued negotiation. These directions move like currents of electricity, or drift like snow blown by wind. These directions are first misinterpreted as forms. The artist manifests forms, drawing the directions conjuring a centrifugal gravity containing the energy into gingerly handled forms. They seem to burst with restlessness. They break apart. These forms fill the artist with resentment, because they seem to be deceptive. They are contrived, they are captive, they seem to reveal a plot, a motive, a maneuver to dam the swift currents, tides, storms, winds, of his vast, ineffable intention.

The artist attacks the surface with acts of violence, cutting, adding more surfaces, disrupting the smooth expanse with impasto, with layers of crumpled canvas fixed upon the flatness. Objects, fragments, adding thickness and dimension. Futile denial? Despair? Struggle?

Regardless of what, it must eventually be discarded, the attempt must be abandoned. Return to the surface, return to the tension, directions of force oozing, drifting, gliding, moving, always in constant motion. Lines of force, fields of tension – in continuing and eternal negotiation. Endless cascade of situations coming together and breaking apart, moving into relationships, never fixed, always moving, endless configurations. And yet these directions of force seem to return, sometimes. They flow and suddenly I remember the other times, past, when these directions, just at this moment were almost the same – except this time the pattern is deeper, affected, colored by the memory of its past and all the scars that mark the time between this new “now” and that “then.”

So the artist, now, surrenders to the sensuality of the surface. This limitless and replaceable – reproducible surface, the canvas, permits anything, and never contains. It is a promiscuous field of play. Tensions, directions, configurations, conjunctions, spaces planes and lines and points are combined however, in absolute disregard for the forgotten rules of Euclidean Geometry. Curves, edges, fuzzy textures come together however they will – and instantly fall apart – imagined credibility, once formally demonstrated, is immediately and necessarily dismissed as incredible.

Each time that the brush affects the primordial energy that flickers upon the surface of the white canvas, a paradox of intensity returns the artist to the next pure, white, expectant, tense, glowing, radiating electricity, bursting with eager anticipation – the next fresh canvas. The paradox of intensity that ends each painting event may be more of a contradiction, or maybe just a point, or a stage of development.

As soon as the energy of unfathomable directions, the ripples and fields of electricity which course over the surface of the chaos-white, canvas – as soon as the brush touches these unfathomable directions, and coaxes them into arrangements – as soon as the brush, employing illusions and tricks of lines, pigments, textures – teases the unfathomable directions into the harness of a composition (a configuration, rather), as soon as the artist arrives at a configuration (composition), that holds the energy of the unfathomable directions of the chaos-white canvas at a focused intensity, a precarious instability, a perpetual-motion-machine generating a limitless and unending focal event of visual energy, a tuned harmonization of visual kinetic energy, a reservoir of the life-energy of consciousness focused, emitting, emanating, a focused intensity that has refined the energy of the primordial chaos-white canvas into a visceral and immediate event/condition that sends a focused laser beam of conscious energy through the eye-gate of the seer. And this configuration created from the raw materials of directions that ripple across the surface of the chaos-white canvas, as soon as it is formalized, as soon as it is harnessed into a configuration of focused intensity, it simultaneously implodes upon itself, the surface collapses under the weight of such a heavy burden.

The configuration of directions (built from the raw materials coursing over the chaos-white canvas) is a reservoir of potential, a charged electrode, a flash point of the life-energy of consciousness. It is intense, and powerful, but never complete or Final. It can never be final because each configuration is an event that is refined, condensed, derived from the greater, unfathomable source, the chaos-white canvas that is as vast and incommunicable as the artist’s unspoken and unspeakable intention. Each painted canvas bears upon its scarred, disfigured surface, a derivative of the whole, a configuration that is itself the outcome of a single act of violence against the indescribable eternity of the surface, the chaos-white canvas.

Each painted canvas, each derivative of the whole, conspires against the original infinity from which it emerged. And at times I have taken those moments, those configurations, and have bent their directions again. I return to that moment when, or where, that configuration emerged and like a Karmic Return, I stand upon that moment, revisited moment, and I mete out retribution. I return to the event, and now, changed by the event itself and by the time that has passed since then, and now, growing dissatisfaction with the outcome of that past moment (what else could it be that would motivate me as much as dissatisfaction does?) I twist and nudge the components of that past “composition” (configuration) into a more energetic relationship, or form.

Each painted canvas, each derivative of the whole, conspires against the original infinity from which it emerged. Each one is just a moment. Each one is a simulacra of the moment in which it occurred (out of which moment it emerged). So each canvas—bearing a single derivation, some discrete remark – is a focal point, a reservoir that sends out a bolt of electricity. But even this bright intensity fails to hide the poverty apparent in every person’s attempt to harness or simulate or even represent the unfathomable directions of energy that move across the surface of the chaos-white canvas… which is itself, a vessel of existence.

The artist spends his life simulating his existence. The artist finds in the canvas a field of experience. It is a surface where life events are registered. The artist’s intention, which must simply be his existence, is continually but never completely expressed. The artist spends his existence struggling against existence. He tampers with things infinitely greater than his isolated and myopic self-ness. He confronts the inevitability of time, trying to capture it or at least trying to store bits of it. He makes the limitless mystery of existence profane in consecutive attempts to represent it, and simulate it. The artist appropriates his phenomenological moment and those shared with “others” for the sake of his narcissistic gaze that stares back, reflected endlessly and incompletely on the surface of the canvas. This inevitable and tragic condition of the artist, locked in a fatal embrace with the canvas, the surface, carries with it a social debt that must be paid. Because of his (original sins?) crimes – against time, against existence, against self, and “other” – the artist is obligated to state his case, to describe his purposes. To demonstrate his constructions, his configurations of the raw energy and directions that move across the surface, that most primordial and infinite surface, the chaos-white canvas.

Subtext, Focal Points, Recurrent Themes.

Increasing the field: selecting recurrent themes, identifiable configurations that can support the next deeper layer of scrutiny. Each configuration, when mature, is set aside to make way for the next chaos-white surface. The composition process will now be described in outline. The composition process can best be described as both phenomenological and historical. Each configuration takes place in a pure and independent isolation, in an intimate relationship between the Painter and the canvas.

The chaos-white surface of the immediate canvas, both unique to itself and yet universal, is already a presence. It has size and shape and this conditions the energy directions that occur upon its surface. This, in turn, is the raw source material that guides the brush (and the eye) in the negotiation of the configuration.. The creation of each configuration (the arrangement) occurs either in distraction or in a state of total focused attention. The similarity between these two states is identified as a trance-like quality. I do not focus my eyes directly upon the surface of the canvas. Neither do I think consciously and directly about the particular direction of the creative work. Instead, I work indirectly, slightly askance. Movements and choices are not deliberate (although the skills necessary to mix the pigments, apply them to the surface and to attain certain visual or textural effects do indeed rest upon a layer of deliberate and dedicated practice) but rather, they are swift and sudden and subconscious. Painting in distraction, I am occupied with other matters, singular or preferably a multitude of tasks – polyphasic thought patterns and gestures. I attend to a multitude of activities mental and physical, and only one among these being the act of painting itself.

I can work on any number of canvases, returning to a surface or to the palette between clouds of outside events in order to effect some single, sudden gesture. The embedded layers of activity, unrelated and various, drive me into a heightened state of distraction, confusion, overstimulation: frantic, manic. The result is an ecstatic trance-like state and the painterly results: energetic, effective.

To attain the focus and attention necessary for the opposite approach, I require total isolation, with no likelihood of unexpected interlopers. The canvas is fixed, upright. The method of brush and I must totally empty myself of every outside thought, especially thoughts related to social interactions (recent contracts with others, public situations, matters of business) as they are especially profane. I have to open myself up to the vibrational qualities of the surface at hand, the pigment, the peculiar quality of light and the dynamics of the space that surrounds the canvas. The result is an ecstatic trance-like state and the painterly results: still, delicate.

The energy and potential of the materials at hand influence my gestures. The composition process is also historical. Each painting must necessarily be consecutive or concurrent. Therefore, the material presence of painted/completed, painted/incomplete and unpainted canvases is inevitable and undeniable in the creative space. I appraise and consider completed works just as I paint them: in distraction, or in complete focused attention or in some fluctuation between these two states.

When I am in a creative phase that spans across multiple pieces, there is a continuous low-level rumination about the theme that ties the work together. The theme develops gradually, usually subconsciously. Big developments occur during dream states, while focusing on the larger portion of attention on another matter. Fragments emerge from conversations, while observing outside unrelated social developments. Themes can be myth/social such as the Quetzacoatl Series, expressive of the art itself such as the exhausted mental state that inspired the purely visceral event of the Metabolism Series. Themes may also be purely technique, such as in the summer of 1997, when will the pieces, previously painted, were layered again with liquid pigment, dripped upon their horizontal surfaces. Expressions of pure hot violence washing across the surfaces. Themes, titles, explanations, descriptions, rarely emerge coincident with the piece. Since the whole essence of Painting might be described as the conjuring of mental and emotional events from deep within the pre-conscious, or unconscious spaces within and around oneself, conjuring up these events to direct them outward toward the canvas. The deeper the events conjured, the more power with which they hit the surface of the canvas, the more elemental the configuration. It is not until later, with the occurrence of other events, or with some study of the canvas’ reflection, or with the words of a close friend, that the essence of the event, or the context/situation’s significance comes clear.

That all this recent blizzard of formal and specific statements on artistic work has occurred is an unprecedented event in this painter’s career, and therefore stands out as an astonishing event. It is an event of perfect clarity, an oasis in the desert of internal hollowness: empty barren lack. It is an early blossom in spring. It is like oil in the water of another realization. It is an island of self-consciousness in the vast black chasm of experience. An animal frenzy of self indulgent self-description after a long period of starvation, starved for reward, starved for praise, starved for (real) pleasure. Words of sense emerging after the blizzard of white noise, of total, chronic, self imposed (?) psychic trauma – ideological conundrums. This essay is a coda to the hollow, burnt, exhausted feelings of an artist’s developmental phase. Now the art is an occupation.

Reprieve: Dignity of the Artist

Writing about my art, trying to reaffirm my dignity, my self-respect, my validity as a human being by systematically moving across the landscape of what has, by my own hand, emerged from nothing but imagination, into an entity, a life work. To move toward an understanding of the canvas as a field of experience, I will do this and continue to do this. It will not end. In the face of all the pigs in life, with all their hate and stupidity, they still could not destroy my destiny. And this just flowing out and the sudden realization that I do not have to punish myself, I do not have to react against anything outside. And in this morning of existence, this white light will shine forever. I am coming way back, from a long distance, from a faraway place.

I am returning to the good place from where I first set out. I return worn, weary, but with gifts, and with the prizes and the holy grail, and with the philosopher’s stone, and with the sword and the helmet, and with the book. I am naked and wounded, but not imprisoned. I am in a pure primordial state. The directions and the energy hover and glide and ripple in all directions. I am immersed in the white-chaos of the pure white surface. Beauty and energy cascade outwards in all directions.

And I can continue now, to write and through the act to writing to construct my creative event outside of me, to bring it into public existence. I am coming into public existence. I am negotiating the side effects of my own metaphysical discipline. To move, to interact, to negotiate the transfer of those material effects – pure signifiers of me, artist, vessel, he who expresses the conditions and the situations of ‘the other’, nothing in myself. And then, finding or creating events where these signifiers bring him the pleasure of respected social action, the recognition of ‘others’, the promise of financial reward. And he is learning to speak through no referent, other than the texts he has signified, as social currency.

Understanding that the artists keeps his own path clear, for the expression of art to continue, stronger over time and increasingly with a life of its own. And those who are truly allies will add energy to the expression. The canvas bears messages of metaphysical liberation. Liberation occurs when we finally and irrevocably claim our own perfect and individually unique destiny. Different, yes, but united together in expression. For no one can survive this mortal coil alone, in the enemy’s camp, a stranger in a strange land.

Historical Development of the Configuration: Text and Subtext

Composition may best be clarified as the well-considered and justified synthetic and pre-determined outcome of the configuration. I have never been able to wholly pre-conceptualize the configuration. In the early work, I would suddenly encounter a shape or combination of shapes, or a scenario, combining it in various combinations visualizing it on the field-surface of the canvas. Usually this practice would be unsuccessful (?) because as I visualized the scenario, it would slip, fold or slide in upon itself, or otherwise blossom outward – basically it would continue in its process of flux and being just as it had before it had developed into a form that caught my attention, came into my consciousness, just at that moment, and allowed me to grab it mentally, to isolate it, freeze it, and subject it to various situations. Now I realize these configurations are patterns of energy and direction. Perhaps – and this is the most elemental and essential source of my process – these patterns of energy and direction are the patterns that mark the electrochemical field of the nervous system: the electric aura that is generated by the body but cannot be contained. The electric halo extends out and beyond the barrier of the epidermis. And the thoughts, mental processes, dreams, emotional reactions, bad vibes and intentions of others, places, situations – all combine and influence this electric field, this life force. And the stillness that comes from drawing deep within, seeking emancipation of beauty, of the pilgrimage to the third eye, the Yoga of self disclosure to self – through this stillness, it first seems that ideas are emerging, and I paint the “ideas.” And icons of occult pursuits, spiritual tools like mandalas, like the TaiJi, like the 64 squares of the chessboard… they bubble up to the surface in combinations and sequences. They are represented accordingly upon the surface of the canvas. The artist eventually comes to study the result, the moment. He discovered fantastic, deep secrets he has kept even from himself, and totally without knowing. He is twice liberated – first from ideas (perhaps ideas that were forced upon him when he was young and helpless – hollow, useless, crippling ideas – and now he appropriates them, uproots them and banishes them by inscribing them on the canvas. Or, perhaps these are ideas but they are so real, so potent, perhaps – he does not know, because he has never uttered them – taboo. These, too, are brought out but when their representations are inscribed upon the canvas, they grow, they become more than ideas – they become power) – second from the deep unconscious. Through his system of retrieval and preservation of the symbol of his deep unconsciousness, he is able to further discover himself. He learns about the relationships of his symbolic underworld. He discovers, perhaps, that he has been a divided self, living with a conflict between his everyday consciousness and the unconscious. He learns how to hear the primordial voice of the dream-self, he sees the eternal and universal consciousness of Man. He is able to steer himself according to the direction of his destiny, where all of Him is united in the true and beautiful voyage of self-fulfillment, of obedience to the True Self.

Art as Self-Disclosure:

But these developments are not themselves necessarily art. They are tools for a metaphysics of Self, what Josef Albers may have meant by “self-disclosure.” Representing the deepest truths inside outwards to the surface of the canvas is “self-disclosure.” To fool yourself into revealing your true nature, you need to represent those deepest truths outwards to the surface of the canvas. Then, eventually gazing upon this new text, reading and identifying its significance you realize shocking truths about yourself. It is at this point where the painting moves into another phase.

Political Effects of the Self-Disclosure: However long it has taken to move through the self-disclosure of ideas and symbols, persistent and continual efforts will lead to an eventual exhaustion, or perhaps to a resolution to never move through these events again. There is a point, where the secret ideas and symbols of your private metaphysical world emerge in their total and irrefutable glory. You must finally choose to stop, to forget, to deny… or to act politically, to take ownership of your total and true self, to seize the courage to take the steps necessary to bring environment, situation, those intimate and more distant people in relationship to you, everything – to take every bold and intelligent and strategic action to bring the public, the social, and material worlds into accord with the greater and most holy will of your united and universal self.

Reconciling the Scholarship of Art and the Self: When the disruptions, the revolution, subsides (and it will not be the last time), a new phase of the creative process begins. At this point, the artist turns his efforts to the literary, social and otherwise public and scholarly archives. The collective works of scholars, the public making and unmaking of human knowledge, wisdom and foolishness – inscribed upon the pages of books, and books and books – carry layers of meaning, of the shared myths of reality, as they have been contrived, nurtured, preserved, contested, overturned and revived. And the way information, as text, moves through the human experience, like tides, begins to make sense.

You rise above belief. You taste the bittersweet fruit, the knowledge of good and evil, these constructions that are both mutually exclusive and relative, that both are linguistic constructions used to anchor each other on a continuum, a purely imaginary scale that eventually, for most, becomes the laziest and poorest e3xcuse, the lowest common denominator in a man’s repertoire of cognitive functions. A good and evil that are linguistic devices for the discrimination of meaning, a continuum that judges and commits more violence against the True Self than any other. And likewise and otherwise, the mechanism upon which the ancient and secret world of ideas, preserved and accumulated since the self-fabrication of its own dawn of existence, is deciphered. Over these long, long journeys, only facets of the whole reveal themselves. For surely this is a great and secret mystery. An unholy simulacra of the infinite mystery of Existence itself. And from these glimpses, the artist can guess the distances between points, the whereabouts of the extreme endpoints, the relationships between ideas; the corruption of intellectual traditions; the gaps between certainties; the Cleverness; the Arrogance; the Significance; the tedious networks of relationships – entangling, treacherous, misleading. The Artist will follow his path through the jungle of this new mystery. He will find ideas – and some he will take, investigate, represent, manifest, construct… upon the chaos-white surface of the canvas. He will never leave this jungle until he realizes he must choose to take that action.

As above, so below: just as the artist once committed those acts of hubris, claiming and subjugating his own secret world of ideas and symbols, so must he now claim and subjugate the obscure ideas of the hidden dark body of mystery, the dark world of humankind’s text – massive vessel that carries the roots and the trunk and the branches of civilization’s ideologies, metaphysics, sciences, literature and philosophies. The Artist, at all costs, must reconcile the inner world of his own consciousness, his True Holy Self, with the exterior worlds of Man’s ideas, the world he was born into, the ideas he was pressed into before he knew even himself. Forced to move into the illusion of an inevitable, eternal, fixed and perfect social world, to believe in it, before he know that there are so many other social worlds, and they are all so fragile, so effervescent, so temporary. And before he even knew of his own True Holy Self, the only safe and steady keel with which he should guide the vessel of his own existence. The Artist will try the ideas of man, the political effects of the negotiation of Truth and propagation of the Reality Effect. The Artist will seize and appropriate the ideas of Man, He will represent them upon the surface of the canvas, inscribed by means of his own brush. The pain and suffering caused by the friction between his True Self and the world’s Body of Ideas will be prolonged and great, ameliorated only by his expression of it. When he appropriated his own ideas, people called him eccentric, crazy, misguided. When he appropriated the ideas of Man, he became a revolutionary, a public menace, dangerous, or at best inscrutable. Ideas tested upon the ultimate and final field of chaos-white canvas will spark embedded and complex scenarios that fold over upon themselves under the pressure of their own weight. Scenes of division and polarity; evidence of struggle; continual hesitation and negotiation between positive and negative spaces will emerge. Topic and background become confused. Appropriation of ideas by ideas take place. Personal life is a wreck. Suffering is great. This is the Man’s struggle, to survey the vast extents to which knowledge making has gone. To liberate himself from the insidious reach of constructed truths. To strengthen his True Self and preserve this. To appropriate the ideas of history and culture, to test them, understand the archaeology of knowledge, to take ownership of true and false knowledge and to discover how to use these tools for his own true purpose. The Artist must confess and accept the totality of his mental and unconscious self and the totality of the collective human condition.

Is this endeavor ever complete? No, the inner self and the outside world are in a constant state of tension, mutually defined by the other, always in a state of relationship. But to crack the code of the self and of human scholarship are noble tasks, and they should be the central objects of study, the critical focal point of this particular phase of the historical development of the configuration.
Art as Discipline, Ritual and Occupation: The Artist now enters a bittersweet time of ‘moral’ living, aware of the limitations of ideas, and disillusioned regarding reality, religion, and science. The burden of societal responsibility weighs heavily upon his shoulders. But it is not heavy. The artist has stirred up the depths of the personal and the social. Secret obscure origins, places where most of society never goes, much too disturbing, dangerous and unpredictable are the results, the outcomes of such meddling. The artist must practice discipline, will, prolonged dedication and determination to work through those final dark times, where maybe only a wild and total abandonment of all inhibition – total dedication, total battle – will get him through.

Through. Or whatever directional metaphor the reader would care to choose: out, over, into the new place. The new place is a white pure field of activity where the tension between Self and the World of Ideas is so perfectly articulated that directions and energy flow and ripple and surge and drift in sublime and perfect clouds of random events.

There is such a perfect chaos. The canvas has become a mirror to the soul that perceives it, reflection of the gaze that receives it. The canvas becomes life process, the place where life events are registered in a continual flow, a deepening cycle of inscription and regeneration. Ideas and symbols of the artist’s consciousness and the Ideas of Man no longer emerge singularly, waiting to be confronted and integrated through a struggle between the artist and the canvas. There are no more strange exercises in self-disclosure. There is no more seeking for mental and textual landscapes for events to reconcile on the field of scrutiny, the canvas. Exterior and interior designs meet and unfold in the process of art as an occupation. The artist has finally moved through all layers of Karmic reconciliation, clearing himself of the misunderstandings, the deception of life’s accidental developments. It is a process that all thoughtful people take. The painter has ritualized his struggle, his pilgrimage, with the pure and primordial surface of the chaos-white canvas, where the situations and dilemmas of his self and his other, experienced by the totality of his nervous system, is then through inscriptions painted on that facing, ever-renewing surface.

Through the ongoing practice of the painter’s ritual, his occupation, the artist learns gradually, over years to perceive indirectly, softly, to realize that the canvas is a mirror to his own consciousness. The events he has been manifesting, struggling with, are exteriorized and reflected events of his own nervous system. He has created for himself a dualism. He learns to first see himself in the canvas’ subtle contours, in the shades and surfaces that distinguish its particular configuration. He later learns that the limitless primordial surface of the canvas will itself provide his very consciousness a destination, a place where he can go to gaze back upon himself. This is the event where the high art begins.

Now equipped with ritual intimacy, the artist and his canvas can move beyond single episodes of reconciliation. The painting event now has changed. No more isolated struggles disconnected from each other because of the painter’s vulnerability – his yet fragile and unprepared eggshell mind. In the past, every time he had opened up his perception wide enough, to let himself drift into the sensitivity of the canvas, he has been caught off guard by the unreconciled bits of reality drifting about within and without him. But now, in the prime of his journey, painting and the results of painting burst, deepening with exponential force.

The artist, now recognizing the directions and energies that move upon the surface of the chaos-white canvas as the reflections of the emanations of his very own nervous system. They are the raw truth of life and consciousness. Those fields of energy that make alive, this mortal coil. They are evidence of life force, they are life force. And the canvas, its chaos-white, taut, accommodating surface, has become the very mirror surface, the reflective field of his very own life force, as if the canvas itself has become a vessel of his consciousness. It is a surface where one moment of his elemental life force, one incident, can be inscribed. And once inscribed, that surface records a configuration of signifiers, together referring to the internal referent of their own existence. The configurations borne on the surface of the canvas have become a text, textual incidents, unfinished sequences of unsituated meaning. As complex as a fleeting moment of consciousness, these texts convey intelligence, potential, infinite relationships between and within. They become building blocks for larger social engagements.

Each time the painter returns to the chaos-white surface of a new canvas, he experiences a phenomenological identification with his present state separated situationally only by the distance between himself and the canvas; separated temporally only by the time between now and the last event of painting. The configuration may resemble the previous. He can also gaze at, read, his recent work, in consecutive order, remember or discover something new, some smaller field that should be focused on, enlarged, deepened. This is the text and subtext of the painter’s event. These texts become the pages of the Artist’s sacred book. The text is what, to the one who reads it, seems to stand dominant. The subtexts are manifold – available to the reader who gazes with greater scrutiny, or who is better informed about the artist’s direction and personal state of affairs. Enough of that for now.

Text and Subtext, Expanding the Field, Moving Deeper, Not Further:

Expanding the field, moving deeper, not further. The individual’s consciousness is relatively stable as it is a function of the nervous system, whose electrical fields animate the rotting flesh that hangs down from his bones. Therefore the High Art of painting does not seek “development” or “forward progress.” When the ritual gaze finds the energy held upon the tension of the chaos-white canvas, it finds the reassuring presence of a reflection, an image of the painter’s own consciousness. Through layers of this experience, he moves deeper into his own textual discourse. There is a deepening stability to the configurations. Change in the text no longer moves in a direction across the surface of the canvas. Now, through the text the painter has learned to split the canvas textually, not with optical illusions of perspective, or by acts of violence, cutting the canvas. When textual sub-configurations manifest themselves repeatedly, perhaps originally outside of the awareness of the painter, he may decide it is an event worthy of further investigation. Upon the new surface he takes this small detail of the previous text, and increases this event, this mood, to the whole of the surface. This is the deepening of the event field.

Representations of a New Millenium

Since there is nothing but the time that we live and move upon the planet surface, all limitations of attention are synthetic. The movement of the new millenium is a synthetic movement. We imagine ourselves on a great ship moving through time and crossing over an important "landmark." We mark this time as if it is land. Landmarks are psychic moments. Their exact construction, or aesthetic appeal is of less importance than the practical effect of their incidental appeal. They must loom out of the landscape and occupy the space they take in difference. They commemorate and differentiate thanks to the power of whatever interests made their materials of construction possible. The artist is the middleman who negotiates the relationship between materials and their buyers. When the public at large is thinking in terms of a topic, such as the so called millenium, the various ideas that emerge first are attached to popular cliches or various ideas about what others might be thinking about. This might pain the listener, exposed to the banal, heavy and flat opinions that most share about what the opinions of others might be.

The prematurely defunct and erroneous notion of millenium, for instance, stands like a dead horse in the river. Stinking and bloated, it is useless even before it occurs. Paris fashion heralds the new year by turning away and memorializing the past in yet another boring postmodern retrospective. A post modern postmodernity. Such an abortion of the now is enough to sicken the toughest stomach. So call it the breech-baby millenium, backing up into the future like a gang of naked Aztecs.

To get around this it seems more effective to lighten the load of all this convoluted postmodern bullshit by realizing that there is no 'after' after. That the before/after dichotomy is not followed by another after (before/after/ after after). In a world that is mortified about the future, what is one to do with the naiive but beautiful idea of avante garde? In a world that lives in total denial of the future (if not fear), what is one to do with notions of futuristic scenes? How can one set a stage and a landmark? How can one create enough shock to separate the public's consciousness of 'now' and 'later'? Here in our world of today, we skip later for the sake of a later later. We postpone the future for the sake of a later future. We are waiting for the signal.

In this most backward of times, this most advanced stage of regression, where are we to find a mark or a signal or an event that can propel the mind forward again and launch us from this desolate alley of echoes? In the new millenium, this current popular state of mind, the artist must be careful to avoid the layering that he has enjoyed personally and privately behind closed doors. When becoming public, in these embedded times, the artist must take on some kind of artificial public conscience, if only for the sake of survival. There is a public voice that by research and intuition becomes credible. But the artist's voice himself confesses the actual creative state.

"From the most primordial recesses of my being come these images. They are frozen segments abridged from the incessant flow of consciousness. Among the myriad notions of culture, 'origin' and 'creation' vie for the place of myth." Creation implies a conscious and deliberate creator with a priori designs. In searching for the primitive there seems to be a conspicuous absence of such an interest. Rather, at the articulation of 1999/2000/2001, at its most original moment of intersection (between millennia, or between centuries, or between ideas about years and times and ends of the worlds) the only events that proceed are the ones that ride upon the inertia of the preceding ones. The unfolding of time is the most exciting of events. Bound by notions of creation, or creativity, one will always exist in the shadow of what ought to be as determined by some greater omniscient force. This is the slow torture of protocol. This is not a protocol of experience, which is not a protocol at all! This is the bondage of submission.

Rather, for the artist, an ever-unfolding landscape of events flows from the primordial recesses of being. References to the creation lay among the rhetoric of submission. They lay among piles of endless loops of text that never quite fit but neither errs too far. This is a web of illusions that simulates experience by mimicking its apparent complicated texts to echo the simplicities of reality. This is notion versus product, and explains why too much planning spoils the end result. See the hijinks of Olympus, for example. The texts I inscribe on canvas echo (but do not simulate) the twists and turns that take place near the [original/immediate] moment of experience. They proceed phenomenologically from the junction of event and perception, even as the artists lives at the cusp of time and public opinion. The barrier between event and perception must be continually minimized by shock, surprise, concentration, and acceptance. The mental and social exercises of the artist must always work to the end of minimizing this barrier.