Totality (3)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach.

Barnett Newman, Be I, 1949, oil on canvas, 93 1/8 × 75 1/8 × 1 3/8 inches, Gift of Annalee Newman, © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (source)

Waver

There is something humanizing about the fact Newman had to correct the zip of Be I (p. 89). It’s a handmade object after all, a red oxide ground, coats of brushed color, a line painted and repainted. One could imagine a more mechanical manufacture, and with modern materials, all hand eliminated—sprayed acrylics on MDF sheets, maybe. It would be a very different object even if the same composition. The reproduction in the book, it occurs to me, must look more like what that latter object would have been than what the real thing is. The digital representation above certainly does.

This on page 91 rather eluded me:

Be I makes the following distinction intelligible: the actual position a viewer may (or may not) physically occupy is conceptually distinct from the standpoint posited by the painting as an image. Just as the line is sharp and wavering, the standpoint projected by the painting is both concrete and notional. The painting declares the difference yet coexistence of these “standpoints.”

…until I read the attached footnote:

An example to illustrate: while Renaissance or Albertian perspective implies a monocular viewer stationed at a fixed point that is as distant from the picture at a that plane is from the picture’s vanishing point, the empirical beholder need not occupy that particular position for him to experience the salience of the illusion. A viewer does not have to stand at the actual perpsectival point geometrically projected by Masaccio’s Trinity and close one eye for the representation to be intelligible as an image of stereometric space.

One of the interesting things about phenomenology is that certain experiences that seem obvious when they’re happening are in fact too specific for language, and closing the gap between the latter and the former requires heroic linguistic efforts.

Art and Objects

Does anyone feel a pang of sympathy for Emily Genauer? Imagine Betty Parsons, Newman’s dealer, claiming that an all-red painting (save for a line of white down the middle) was a “highly emotional expression of the theme of life and death.” Genauer can’t be the only critic to have read that and thought, “Give me a flipping break.”

This section highlights just how susceptible are minimal abstractions to damage, or even mechanical failure as art objects. (Be I took a shot from the corner of a piece of furniture and the initial restoration was not a success.) Darby Bannard recalled seeing Reinharts and concluding that the incidental effects of light on the imperfectly stretched, darkly painted canvases had become elements of the work in a disappointing fashion.

The remarks on page 94 about painting one painting (Newman: “I think a man spends his whole lifetime painting one picture”) suggests an interesting relationship between the painter and time. A great portion of the value of visual art relative to other creative forms is its immutability. The static object, if effective, invites revisitation. In the meantime, we have changed, and upon bringing our new selves back to the object, it seems to have developed. More than could be seen in the past is revealed in the present, and the process repeats.

A is B

Schreyach’s double-entendre of of “one-line painting” is lovely (page 99):

The deceptively simple structure of the poem’s self-reference harbors a complex proposition. The one-line poem (or in Newman’s case the one-line painting) advances a certain view of artistic expression: namely, the concept that “self-evidence” must be represented. [Jennifer] Ashton illuminates: “insofar as the painting is an expression of the concept of the painter, and the painting you see is what that concept looks like as a painting, the painting itself is also thereby the expression of a type or a kind of thing, albeit the sole instance of it.”

Having never heard of William Empson or the New Criticism with which he’s associated, I looked him up and found this interesting passage:

Empson’s manuscript of a major work outside literary criticism, The Face of the Buddha, begun in 1931 on the basis of often grueling research across many parts of the Buddhist world, was long thought to be lost, but a copy miraculously turned up among the papers of a former editor at Poetry London, Richard March, who had left them to the British Library in 2003. According to the publisher, Empson “found himself captivated by the Buddhist sculptures of ancient Japan, and spent the years that followed in search of similar examples all over Korea, China, Cambodia, Burma, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in the great museums of the West. Compiling the results of these wide-ranging travels into what he considered to be one of his most important works, Empson was heartbroken when he mislaid the sole copy of the manuscript in the wake of the Second World War. The Face of the Buddha remained one of the great lost books until its surprise rediscovery sixty years later [...] The book provides an engaging record of Empson’s reactions to the cultures and artworks he encountered during his travels, and presents experimental theories about Buddhist art that many authorities of today have found to be remarkably prescient. It also casts important new light on Empson's other works, highlighting in particular the affinities of his thinking with that of the religious and philosophical traditions of Asia.”

Another day, another sixty-dollar book on the wish list.

Sounding Out

The discussion of Aaron Siskind’s photographs of Newman (pp. 100-102) has me thinking differently about the press materials with which I’m daily inundated. Certainly the art ought to speak for itself. But get a Siskind involved and the documentation may leave cues—importantly, nonverbal cues—about how to relate to the work.

I follow the program of Nancy Margolis Gallery, previously featured, which has transformed from a physical space to an online effort. The director has to consider what kind of representations will add value to the experience of looking at her web pages, and ultimately the art itself. It is at once a commercial consideration and a philosophical problem of some intricacy.

Onement I

Those of us who have always been a little suspicious of Harold Rosenberg will find an intensely sophisticated argument against him at the top of page 110:

Self-evidence is not an event that occurs as a consequence of the physical manipulation of materials. It is instead a concentrated achievement, fulfilled by an artist who progressively realizes his commitment to poetic expression in relation to the constraints and possibilities of a responsive medium that affords its representation.

Unrelated, may God bless the conservators who have to deal with these couple of oil-on-masking tape-on-oil-on-canvas paintings.

To Be Or Not

It is unsurprising to learn that Newman’s poetry is stark and aggressively spatial. The poem cited on page 113 even relies on a concrete left-right split that recalls Be I. Schreyach does fine work as an art historian relating the analysis of “Prayer” (1945) to the broad themes of his art. I, unburdened by similar professional demands, am free to note that it’s a relief that Newman mostly stuck to painting.

Concord

Page 119:

But it is not just that Concord declares the difference between the object as an inert physical thing (A) and the symbolic work of art as Newman’s vital proposition (B). It also declares the difference between the work of art (A') and the abstruse thought that it represents (B'). Concord claims for those distinct categories a compacted identity that is something more than their interdependence.

This is attached to a footnote also worth unburying:

The claim is reflected by Newman’s interest in the Passover Seder, in which a blessing is made to distinguish the sacred from the profane. But when the Sabbath and the Passover dates coincide, the blessing changes from “Blessed be thou, O Lord, who distinguishes between what is holy and not holy,” to “Blessed be thou, O Lord, who distinguishes between what is holy and what is HOLY.” Newman dates his interest in this distinction to 1950, and said that it represented his “entire aesthetic” in “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Matthews,” 290.

I want to hear more about this response, and I’m hoping that Schreyach will ply me with a few more details.

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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. For future titles, see the ASBC schedule.

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