Thursday 19 November 2015

"Suffused" by Judy Graham at NAC

The latest show at NAC, "Suffused" by Judy Graham, is not at all easy to pin down in words, and Judy herself does not make too much of an effort to describe it in words that convey and immediately accessible meaning. In her artist's statement, she says, "These images are most often a projection of memory, a memory that recalls the biological. They have taken up residence where the medical laboratorial self left off, or where research into human anatomy only exists now in the stacks. These drawings are meant to recall organic abstraction and the such-ness of biotic potential."

What really threw me in this oracular statement was the word "such-ness," which I have only come across before in a Buddhist context and is there used in a metaphysical sense to refer to what one can otherwise call "the nature of things as they are" -- the irreducible nature of reality which cannot be changed but only overcome.  We live in "Samsara," that is material existence which is characterized by suffering, and the aim of the Buddhist is to rise above it by refusing to let oneself be dominated by it.

How does that apply to lab samples, since what I suppose Judy started out with were slides of cell structures, dyed and magnified for scientific analysis?  For an answer, all one can do is look at the ink and pastel drawings on the walls of the Dennis Tourbin Gallery, since the function of the words in an artist's statement is to refer one back to the visual art they attempt to define.

These drawings are all quite large and essentially similar, since cell structures cannot vary dramatically and the colours were originally chosen to throw these cell structures into relief.  A less metaphysical term than "such-ness" would be "a given."  The given in this case seems to be a bean.  Each of these remembered and consequently simplified cell structures, reduced to an abstraction, somewhat resembles a bean.  Perhaps when I think of these cell structures as the building blocks of a human being with its potential for physical and emotional expression indicated by such titles as "Seeing Red" and "Repulsion," I might make a childish pun and call that bean "a human bean."

Each human bean or group of human beans is surrounded by a contrasting shadow which conveys in pastel much the same effect as a watercolour wash, throwing it into relief.  The word "such-ness" comes back as no more precise word can serve as a technical, scientific definition of what Judy Graham is attempting to convey.  It can only be an allusion, bearing the same relation to words as aboriginal smoke signals do the messages they convey.

In the end the words send one back to the pictures, which is what visual art is all about.  Its "such-ness" consists of shapes and colours and whatever meaning they convey directly through the eye.  In other words, are these drawings worth looking at?  And I think I can safely say that they do have that worth to a considerable degree.  What is ultimately Buddhist about them is that they can serve as a focal point for meditation.  You may ask, for meditation on what?  Insofar as meditation implies contemplation of a particular topic and not simply staring into space in order to cultivate detachment, I might say that its object is "the human condition," the state of being a human bean.  In other words, I think I have ended up saying exactly the same things as Judy, only at greater length, as I try to explain her few, carefully chosen words to myself.

Wednesday 4 November 2015

Séan Benton and Aaron Thompson at NAC

Barry Joe, who usually posts my blog for me because he is so much more technologically adept than I am, has been laid up recently, which is one reason why I have not posted to my blog for a while. 

Another reason is that I did not get an opportunity to speak to Séan Benton, who put on a portrait show in October, or to speak to anybody who could tell me much about him.  I was just faced with a row of full face portraits, some of them actors and actresses, some of people he knew and three of himself, with nothing to explain to me why he thought these faces were important to him or how he felt about them.  With the exception of the self portraits, which were poetic and humorous, all I could say about them was that they were technically successful without going into a lot of fine detail and probably resembled the sitters.  The self portraits were intriguing, especially one with an eye patch which made me think of a pirate, and one with a raven which made me think of Poe's idea of "Nevermore."  But when I tried to arrive at the artist's personal intention, which is what really interests me, I drew a blank.

I was lucky enough to get a personal interview with Aaron Thompson, who told me that he had been very much influenced by a series of paintings by a famous German artist, Gerhard Richter, which are visual references to the ideas of John Cage.  As soon as he mentioned John Cage, I knew what he was talking about because during my last year at the University of Illinois, I spent a lot of time with John Cage, who was a good friend of a friend of mine in the Music Department.  John Cage was there to work on a Happening.  For this event he took certain melodies of Mozart and put them through permutations based on the I Ching.  The I Ching is an ancient Chinese book of divination.  To consult it, you take three coins and cast them six times.  According to the way they fall, you get a hexagram which provides a wise and valid answer for the question you were asking.

The rationale behind this is that because everything in the universe is connected, when you do something completely random, you make a profound connection.  John Cage, believing this, was interested in what was random for its own sake and was trying to make Mozart random.  I did not feel myself that random notes by Mozart were an improvement on notes consciously organized by Mozart, but I found the idea fascinating and have consulted the I Ching ever since.

What Aaron Thompson does, following the example of Gerhard Richter, is apply the search for what is random and thereby meaningful.  He takes a large panel with handles on either side, covers it with dollops of paint and draws it over a canvas.  He repeats this process, with different layers of paint, until he feels it is time to stop.  Knowing when to stop can be quite tricky.  The result is not, as you might expect, a uniform series of messes, because the decision when to stop involves the artist's eye and judgement.

In fact, each canvas is different and has a kind of glow to it that I said made me think of sunrise or sunset on a different planet.  He agreed.  I also said that the light patches on a darker background looked like openings and made me think of the way the older religious literature used the word "opening" to stand for the perception of a certain mystical insight.  He agreed with that too.  But I would never have understood his work in this way if I hadn't inquired about his personal intention.  Revealing each artist's personal intention I take to be the real purpose of this blog.