Ordinarily I only refer to my previously published articles on the ArtMonkeyWrench Links to Other Writing page. I’m making an exception and reposting this piece directly on my site because it’s the very first essay I wrote for Artcritical and also, while it can still be found in Artcritical’s deep archive, it no longer appears in their search.  I’ll add that although both galleries mentioned are now closed, the artists are doing well, and I think the essay holds up nicely.

Artcritical Summer 2003

The Raw and the Cooked by Deven Golden

Though it is often said that it is the journey that matters and not the destination, this can be a difficult argument when addressed to the viewer of art. Left only with the fruits of the journey’s end to contemplate, the path taken can seem superfluous and, as is often the case with excruciatingly boring art, little more than an excuse. Indeed, art has this in common with comedy: If you have to explain it…

Yet, when confronted with complex works of striking beauty, I admit that I do often wish to know more – how was this made and what was the artist thinking?

Shirley Kaneda
Untitled #17, 2003
Mixed Media on Watercolor Paper
16 x 12 inches
Courtesy Feigen Contemporary, New York

Roland Flexner
Untitled, 2002
Ink on Paper,
7 x 5½ inches
Courtesy Miller/Block Gallery, Boston

The reason I bring this up is that there were two shows that totally knocked me out this season – one by Roland Flexner at Caren Golden Fine Art and the other by Shirley Kaneda at Feigen Contemporary – and how the works were made becomes significant in attempting to ascertain what the artists might have been thinking. As you can see from the illustrations, both works bear obvious similarities, almost to the point that a cursory examination might lead one to assume that they are by the same artist, the only difference between them being the addition of hot colors to one and not the other.

They are by different artists, but even after one becomes aware of that it is easy to compile a long list of their commonalities: a work on paper whose size promotes an intimate relationship with the viewer; a sensuous liquid quality; a playful ambiguity between micro and macro scale; a nearly Greenbergian adherence to the dictates of the two-dimensional surface; a strong use of negative space and, with that, crystal clear composition. Superficially, at least, the affinities are numerous.

Closer inspection, while reinforcing many of the shared characteristics, begins to reveal important differences as well. While both drawings appear fluid, the black and white Flexner is, or at least appears to be, more natural. One suspects that Flexner’s process in some way harnesses the physical act of creation in a fairly direct manner. The same does not hold true for Kaneda’s work. Although its abstract image is naturalistic, its slightly photographic shimmer – on a certain level it approximates the look of reflective Mylar – and the fact that it is a watercolor, would seem to belie a straight forward approach in its creation. So, if the Flexner appears to be a record of an action, the Kaneda appears, while abstract, to be in some way depictive or representational.

At this point it seems likely that each artist used a different process to create their work. But in light of their obvious similarities, one might still give pause upon learning that, in nearly every way, their working methods stand at polar opposites. Kaneda’s watercolor involves a multi-layered system in its creation; Flexner’s ink on paper is the result of a single action. Kaneda’s piece, as did all of the works from this series, took between 9 and 16 hours to make; Flexner’s between 4 and 5 seconds. Kaneda’s involves drawing, brushes, watercolors, a scanner, a computer, Photoshop software, and a high quality printer (and then more brushes and watercolor); Flexner’s involve soap, ink, and a brush attached to a hollow tube.

Kaneda, who considers this work both a possible study for a larger painting and a complete piece in itself, starts by making a preparatory watercolor. This first stage watercolor is then placed on a scanner and a digital image is created for manipulation in Photoshop. After much play, where both the lines and colors are massaged and cajoled, watercolor paper is placed in the printer, and a black and white only print is produced. The image on the computer screen now becomes the color study, while the print out becomes the preparatory drawing for the finished watercolor. Hour built upon hour, yet the resulting artwork shows little sign of its labor intense birth – instead cloaking its generation in a faux naturalism that feels light, unmannered and, despite its acidic palate, almost harmonious.

Totally circumscribed as it is by its process, Flexner’s work is nearly impossible to think of as anything other than a finished work in itself (although, having said that, anyone who knows what Flexner is technically capable of would not be completely shocked to walk into a gallery and see an eight foot version some day). Mixing ink or another black pigment with a medium comprised mostly of soap and water, Flexner places a small amount of the resulting solution on the end of a hollow brush. Standing over the piece of paper, Flexner then expands the black fluid to the desired size, waits for the ebb and flow of the mixture to achieve just the right parameters, and lays it down in a single gesture. In other words, and in the space of 5 seconds, he blows a bubble and pops it on the paper.

Now looking at their actions, Kaneda and Flexner appear to have little in common. The art work seems to point to shared concerns, while their processes seem to counter that assumption. So, what gives? Do the artworks bear false witness of intent, or is it that the productive action of the artists is, while interesting, in actuality irrelevant?

If one trusts the visual as being indicative of the larger meaning, as I usually do, then one also has to trust that Flexner and Kaneda do pursue shared concerns. If this would seem to dismiss the process as unimportant, perhaps the next step is to see if statements of commonality can be made about the process.

The first thing to note, obviously, is that each has pushed method to an extreme. Kaneda by adding layer upon layer of synthetic process until, one would expect, any chance for meaning, warmth, or naturalness would be totally, wrung from the drawing. Flexner by removing so much of the process usually associated with drawing, including- incredibly-even physically coming into contact with the paper, that anything resembling composition, gesture, or even touch could reasonably be assumed to be out of the question.

Then there’s the element of time which, as with the processes, has been pushed to the outer ends of the spectrum. While spending, as Kaneda can, up to 16 hours on a drawing is certainly not unheard of, the medium of watercolor is usually practiced with the pursuit of immediacy in mind. Stretching the time out this way, in practical terms making the drawing a hyper-extended, multi-session affair, attenuates the thinking process associated with the drawing, layering in information even as the artist is constantly challenged to hold on to her thread of thought.

Conversely, having any thoughts at all, let alone contemplating line, density, and composition in the space of four seconds seems, on the face of it, highly unlikely if not impossible. Yet, somehow, Flexner does it. As with all of his drawings, the one above displays the artist’s uncanny ability to control all of the qualities expected of a precision line drawing: a clean line, subtle manipulation of tone, and an articulate description of space. (For those who might doubt the artist’s control, Flexner is happy to pull out nearly identical drawings he has created during a single session). Where Kaneda manages to hold on to the immediate in the face of hours of toil, Flexner manages to snatch a controlled result in the space of a breath.

Here, finally, we come to that which underlies both artists’ work. That is, the true subject for each can be summed up (somewhat crudely in words, with such elegance in their drawings) as this: manipulating time – whether though hyper-extension or hyper-compression – can create a lens through which we can view the process of welding ideas and actions into a single armature, a single argument, a singular work of art.

Kaneda and Flexner may seek answers through processes at opposite poles, but the larger truth is that they both seek answers by exploring the polar extremes of process. In the end, it should come as no surprise that their works share so many visual affinities; given their shared visions of art’s potential, it would be stranger if they did not.

For me, the difficulty writing about visual art starts with my struggle to describe the open-ended and visceral experience of looking within the far narrower limitations of language. Prose writers complain about the information and nuance lost when their work is translated from one language to another, but at least it still follows the rules of language on both sides of the translation. Add to the linguistic struggles the vagaries of individual visual acuity – perception of color, line, depth, etc. – between viewers and you begin to have some idea of how difficult it is to share something meaningful about an artwork in a few hundred, or even a few thousand words.

Beneath my struggle to write cogently about art is the far broader and slippery problem of subjectivity. As everything we perceive is passed through the filter and processor of our brain, it’s simply inevitable that who we are as individuals colors all of our thoughts. This fact is so ingrained in our thinking that for most of us it is all but invisible. Neither is it news; contemporary culture has created all sorts of terms in the public sphere attempting to foreground this insight. And truthfully, because subjectivity is our natural state of dealing with the world, we make do. Unless we can’t.

Four years ago my sister died and then, starting about two years ago, all of these people I loved died during a 12 month period in the following order: my mother-in-law, a very close friend’s spouse, my father-in-law, my mother, and one of my closest friends. Having gone through this, I think I can say with some certainty that those who have lost people close to them can understand what a list like this means, while those who have not can not. In short, the world, and by extension art, is forever transformed by this experience.

During the time these illnesses and deaths were happening the only writing I completed were eulogies. For months and months afterward, exhibitions were only of faint interest to me, writing art criticism impossible. I was aware that the lens through which I viewed art was changing, and mourning was keeping my thoughts from coalescing. I was disinterested in expediting the process. In the end, two entire years passed between my last published piece and my next, when I was finally able to put together my thoughts on first one exhibition, and then another. The “problem of subjectivity” seemed to recede into the background, while the persona of formal analysis graciously and reassuringly once more took center stage.

Or so I thought, for in the event, just weeks after posting my essay on Picabia, I walked into an opening that offered proof positive that I was mistaken in this assumption. The paintings in the show were by an artist I have followed for many years and, that being the case, have expectations about the forward trajectory of her work. Initially a representational painter, her style has evolved over the past decade into a strange and wonderful hybrid, a roiling frisson of personal image and pure abstraction fighting for visual dominance, resulting in artworks as unexpected as they are satisfying. And, in point of fact, there were a few paintings that continued brilliantly in that direction.

Most of the works in this new exhibition, however, diverge from this path. Where the paintings leading up to the current show present puzzle piece layers of body parts and vibrant colors, these new works feature simple compositions. Images – horse heads, flowers, flags, ribbons, an umbrella, a tightly cropped hand, a foot, the torso of a woman – take up nearly the entirety of each canvas, indeed flow over the edges. Abstract shapes are added sparingly and used to settle the viewer’s eye rather than disrupt it. The spare palette, applied in buttery, dream-like strokes, is comprised primarily of velvety browns, lavender purples, and mid-night blacks, although there are small appearances, here and there, of deep green, bright red, and pink. Of the just over a dozen works, nearly half feature a horse’s head. As with the other images they are presented to us in profile, mostly browns and blacks with intense black circles for eyes, and drawn in a child-like manner that belies the sophistication of the painting process. They stare out at us, alive but mysteriously still.

It takes little effort to describe these paintings formally, and yet so much more went through my mind as I moved through the exhibition. Forefront in my thoughts was the knowledge that the artist had lost both of her parents only weeks apart the preceding year. Which brought back fresh thoughts of my own mother’s recent passing. A big fan of painting, my mom would have loved this show. This in turn reminded me of a conversation I had had years earlier with the artist’s father, how astute he had been about her work and, as my mom had been for me, how supportive. The paintings, it appeared to me, were speaking directly to these thoughts and memories: A hand plucking a single flower, beautiful but now cut off from life. A woman in a field of purple flowers, her head cut off by the top of the painting, moving away. A lone umbrella offering meager shelter from a deluge of purple rain. The overall prevalence of black and purple, funerary in mood and tone, created a narrative atmosphere so heavy with emotion that it was difficult not to picture each of the somber horses pulling a shrouded hearse in its wake. But this is not to say that I found the paintings morose, for their affect was quite the opposite: a transcendental feeling of joy. Sadness as well, yes, but sadness rooted in the memory of something so wonderful – a parent’s love – that it was transformative; deep grief transmuted by paint into beauty. Going up to the artist to congratulate her, I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears.

So, as a critic I ask myself: Does the art actually speak of these things? Did my own recent and still clearly raw experiences of death and mourning color my perception so strongly as to render my insights too unique to be critically relevant? Does speaking of these things risk coloring, warping even, a neutral viewers experience of these paintings? Or did my own grieving, coupled with my knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the creation of these works, give me a heightened sense of awareness and the ability to tune into a deeper current of embedded meaning worth sharing and, in doing so, opens up the possible interpretations for others?