Totality (1A)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club Reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach.
Page 23:
On the one hand, frottage isolates the objects it registers from their contexts, permitting the artist to freely use the patterns as pictorial elements (and thus to transcend the actual physicality of the rubbing by means of the virtual illusion of the representation). On the other hand, the graphic textures index the physical causes of their appearance. Such material traces can be so insistent that they compromise a viewer’s ability to sustain the illusion of the depictive role.
Schreyach gleans this distinction from writings from the mid-1920s by Ralph Ubl on Max Ernst, which in turn feeds an exchange that William Rubin had with Barnett Newman regarding the likening by the former of the latter’s use of frottage to Ernst’s. Newman demurred, obliging an articulation of the difference, though he regarded it seriously: “This isn’t linking Ernst and me in terms of a cheap technique but a generalization based on high purpose.” Schreyach, on the frottage of Genetic Moment (1947):
Their wholly intentional character—both as marks Newman meant to make and as shapes meant to signify—yields to the viewer an impression of pervasive motivation unfolding among the parts of the image, as if the creative force alluded to in the painting’s title were not simply an unconscious drive toward “genetic” replication and chance variation but a volitional consummation of signification at this “moment.”
Has anyone thought harder about the phenomenology of mark-making in the last thirty years than Schreyach? If so I’d like to know who it is.
I spent a proprioceptively expensive portion of late July trying to get wood grain texture to print in this mokuhanga. While in the midst of the effort I took it for granted that it was part of the charm of the medium and I was simply trying to acquire a basic technique. Upon reading the above and following pages I thought about it further. The texture is at once a depiction of a kind of atmosphere, a formal device that causes the background to recede behind the solidly applied keyblock, and literal wood grain. That it could be all at once testifies to how deep and wonderful is art. Schreyach acknowledges the tripartite effect on page 35:
Newman fittingly analogizes the studio experience of an artist working close to the edges of a support (in this case, the vertically mounted paperboard upon which he painted Euclidian Abyss) to approaching the edge of a restricted horizontal surface (such as the earth defined as a flat plane by Euclidian geometry) before plummeting off. The painting is a table, a tablet, a tableaux.
I understand the motivation behind the “cheap technique” remark—what he and Ernst were doing were different—but the commonality is worth appreciating, that frottage, as well as any other method, has enormous potentialities simply as physical action. Which is to say that there are no cheap techniques, only cheap artists.
I’ve become kind of obsessed with the chapter titled “Catachresis” (pp. 40-43).
Deploying Newman’s vocabulary produces its own distortion-effect: it interrupts what is experienced as a moment of of pictorial address—an instantaneous perception of the work’s self-display—by presenting its simultaneity according to a sequential narrative of visual dynamics.
Schreyach’s twist is fascinating. He enters a discussion of proper and figurative denotations in language, shows that these descriptors nearly refer to each others’ referents when it comes to painting, and then asserts that Newman’s works are attempting a third, distinct thing:
Catachresis… applies to a figure that assumes the role of a proper term in the absence of one, as happens when we speak of the “arm” of a chair. Since there is no other term that could take the place of “arm,” it assumes the status of a proper or literal term, even though we still grasp its underlying metaphorical or figured quality….
Newman’s creative achievement in Euclidian Abyss was to produce such a sign. It was among his first works to appear disruptively, like a catachresis in language does, reconfiguring the relations governing the terms of proper and figured. In comparison to this ideographic image, both formal abstraction and surrealism begin to appear figured, too obviously metaphoric to have superseded representational art in the pursuit of the real.
I’m reminded of Harold Bloom’s long-term contemplation of misprision. Misprision, for Bloom, is a creative act of misinterpretation or misreading that occurs when a later writer or artist engages with the work of his precursor. The later artist reinterprets the precursor’s work in a way that is deliberately misinterpreted and revisionist. Bloom claims that the new work is not a distortion of the older work, but a meaningfully original one.
Misprision is key to Bloom’s broader ideas about the anxiety of influence. Poets haunted by the influence of their predecessors may use creative misreading in order to escape it. Much of what looks at first like philosophical noodling on Newman’s part, thanks to Schreyach, can be seen as akin to an effort of literary misprision, as Newman attempted to escape the influence of art terminology that was prevalent but not entirely satisfactory. Newman was being difficult, but he wasn’t merely being difficult.
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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.
Considering interpretation and misinterpretation of art, I found this passage by Schreyach insightful:
“Those issues populate his [Newman] dense body of writings, which are a major resource for discerning his intent and interpreting his art. They are so important, in fact, that most if not all accounts of Newman’s paintings are advanced with repeated references to what the artist said about his work, using his own statements as support for claims about what it means or symbolizes.”
I recently had visitors to my studio and upon seeing a painting, they wanted clarification on what was in front of them. To my eyes, it was obvious; I am a representation painter, but perhaps I am so close to the subject, what is obvious to me, isn’t necessarily to others.
I am apprehensive of the need, and/or desire, for written explanation to justify aesthetic value. However, I also believe art criticism is paramount and can enlighten ones perspective. A work of art should, first and foremost, stand on its own through the artist’s vocabulary. One can debate the merits of how one responds to a work of art, but ultimately, its not clear to me how much it matters.
Corot said “Nothing has value except for the hunger one has for it…Things have real or fictive value only for the need or hunger for them by which we are seized…”
On a broader note, I find making my way through this book taxing, sometimes finding myself thinking, ‘enough, just look at the picture, don’t over-analyze it’. I respectfully submit this is research more than art criticism.