Writings

May 10, 2008

Looking at the Milton Resnick show today in Chelsea. “Wedding”. I haven’t been moved by a painting like this in years. Knocked over. The sheer saturation of life, the endlessness of it. The neverending mix of pathos and joy. The depth. The physical, spatial sense of depth and the depth of spirit. I thought of Titian, of the Pieta, not with its sense of sorrow, but with the overwhelming sense of life-force and presence. We don’t make paintings like this anymore. I’m trying in my way; but I have eyes – I can see – I don’t even come close to beginning to come close – this is just staggering. We don’t have the necessary belief anymore. Where the hell have all the mystics gone?

De Kooning spoke about needing to be on the edge of something all the time or the painting just dies. Resnick spoke of falling. No edge – just falling. De Kooning was a master painter, perhaps the greatest American painter of the twentieth century. Resnick – as irascible as he was – Resnick was a mystic. He took painting there.

And people would walk in to the room in the gallery and see this painting and I don’t know what they thought – maybe, “oh, right, dense all-over color field painting, right.” I’ve got no idea. But they came, browsed and left – and I’m thinking, that’s it? And it’s not about the appearance of the thing. In a way, it’s almost incidental. Yes, it’s through our eyes that we receive it, but it’s with our being that it resonates, that it hits and comforts and breaks and overwhelms.

How did he do that?

May 9, 2008

Tomorrow I deliver the work to the gallery for the show.  Opening next week.

I reread my last artist statement – and I think it’s a fairly good description of what I’m doing.  But there’s something more, that I really don’t know how else to put it, and I don’t mean this at all cleverly: I’m painting – I’m making a painting.  That’s really and finally just what I am doing.

Dear Howard Singerman,

A curious thing just occurred –

After I had posted the open letter to you on this blog I was somewhat uncomfortable with it. Something felt not quite right. It wasn’t that I disagree with anything I had written there. Perhaps it was that I wasn’t used to being so direct in words publicly. Or perhaps it was that the situation we’re in culturally, in these times, is more complex and nuanced than I feel my words described. I don’t know, but I was planning on deleting my letter to you from the blog and reworking it if I could into something that felt more complete. In any case, this morning, just before I could get to the blog site, I received an email from a grad student where I teach part time as an adjunct. Through a series of coincidences Mary had visited my website and she wrote to tell me what my words meant to her, particularly what I had written in my letter to Howard Singerman. So there I was…and well, it made me pause before deleting the letter.

So, I’m adding this on - I guess to try to open up the space, and I’m not sure what that means exactly. I know people are engaged in all kinds of making today, creating actions and experiences, in many different ways and forms, and heart and mind are being engaged, together - I see it, in the world and in the artworld. I believe something is turning, and we’re right thick in the middle of it. I guess in the end, I’m actually hopeful. And in my way I’m trying to pitch in.

So, for what it’s worth, my two cents…

I hope this letter finds you well.

Best,

Jordan Wolfson

August 22, 2001

I keep thinking about those last paintings I did in the Bakah apartment before I moved studios. Those dark dense ones. There’s something there that I need to try again. The push. The push, the push, the push.

If you don’t push, you don’t know.

You don’t know if the door opens.

It’s time again, time again, to forget the rest of the garbage and try for the thing that counts –

To care. To really care. To reach for it.

Why the hell not? You got something better to do? “It’s just as silly not to.”

August 23, 2001

Developing the space, holding it, holding the air, the light, containing it and then shifting it, expanding it out, rounding the edges of the rectangle as the space expands like a wonderful golden balloon.

August 24, 2001

It feels good to break it open, to cut loose on the thing. De Kooning describes himself as sometimes getting hysterical and it coming out rather good. I’d call it getting even.

February 27, 2002

The deeper nature of the play with figure/ground: is this not in some way coming from a desire to give form to a presence we sense in the invisible? Look at Cezanne. Look at his skies. Look at Morandi.

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Andrew spoke of painting as reparation. When I mentioned the feelings of doubt about the efficacy of painting in any real sense in our lives today, when I step into the studio – he spoke of painting as reparation, as repair. How can there be repair without a wound? Is not all great painting great reaching? Reaching and achieving. Reaching and arriving.

The willingness to face the doubt, the ennui, the fear of no meaning, again and again, and in the face of blankness to state otherwise, to discover, to reveal, to repair otherwise.

An Open Letter to Howard Singerman:

Dear Howard Singerman, April 14, 2008

Awhile back I had written to you a brief note expressing my gratitude and appreciation for your book Art Subjects, in which you provide a detailed account of the history of art education in this country and raise convincing possibilities about some of the causes that have contributed to the current state of affairs in the artworld. I found your book extremely gratifying and also relieving, in the way that finding a map can be relieving; I may not know how to get to where I’d like to go, but at least I’ve got some kind of sense about where I am and how I arrived here.

Near the end of the book, just before the conclusion, you bring a discussion about the quality of transcendence that I found deeply moving and poignant and that I would like to quote at length:

The distance Adorno and Marcuse promised is no longer available. The space of the aesthetic can no longer be a critical space; the work of art cannot escape to be somewhere or something else. Marcuse’s thesis that art’s radical possibilities—“its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberations”—lie “precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior” becomes not just unbelievable but also, and more damningly in the modern university, terribly naïve. That version of transcendence has been replaced by another one. The works of postmodernism in the university thematize their positions and reflect their knowing better, letting those of us who know, know that they too are vigilant. They will not be unknowing victims of history or theory, just necessarily, historically, victims. This thinking, or outthinking, the end of each attempt operates now as transcendence.

Howard Singerman, Art Subjects (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999), 211-212.

This hit me in the chest like a brick. I feel that you got it right, and painfully so. Not as an indictment of the university, as you immediately go on to explain in your conclusion, where you “insist on the university as a crucial structuring site where artists and art worlds are mapped and reproduced, and which is, therefore, a place to be looked at.” Rather, what I found so stunning in what you wrote is the description of the withering of the power of transcendence in the creative life of our culture. No way out. No belief in a way out. But rather we must find sufficient an analysis of how we are necessarily trapped and take refuge in our having figured this out without getting blindsided.

I’m sure I am not alone and that among all of the many artists working today there are those who have not abandoned a belief in the function and power of transcendence in their work. Transcendence here is a slippery term; perhaps it is more apt to say that there is something more, something beyond our current conditions, something of fuller life, something more human, something of love. And art, as it has in the past, may have a role to play, in our collective awareness, in nurturing our living with this something more.

This is perhaps not university fare. What I am trying to say certainly doesn’t wield any great criticality, and it can easily be seen as steeped in an archaic romanticism. But I believe that what I am saying comes not just from the heart, but also from a sure practicality. If we’re going to somehow together get beyond our apparent cul-de-sac of a culture, and if we’re going to survive this current mess that our planet is in, we’re going to need to sense a “something more” that the heart opens to. And our art can courageously touch the heart and call upon it, and remind us of who we may have always been and who we may yet be.

If this is naïve, so be it. But I believe it is time for the mind in our culture to regain its intimate alliance with the power of the heart. Is this an appropriate endeavor for a university setting? I don’t know – but I believe it is a deeply necessary endeavor for our time.

Thank you again for your important book and for your consideration of these words.

Sincere regards,

Jordan Wolfson

March 20, 2008

Something that realist work has going for it – inherently – is the caring for transitions, edges, everything seen and cared for.  That care can become overly anticipated and rote – but the need for attention is understood, at least theoretically.  One of the things often overlooked in the general myth of de Kooning and action painting was the actual slow deliberation of looking and attending.  Watching and finding the right transition from part to part, the right mark, the right edge – that serves the vision.  That takes patience and receptivity and care.  And it nurtures and urges the painting towards indivisibility. There is love.  That, in the end, is what gives the work real life.  The urging and steering and vision of the heart.  No matter if the appearance of the work is realist, expressionist, minimalist (Agnes Martin!) – love is love, care is care, attention is attention, presence is presence.

February 24, 2006

Maybe Danto is right and that’s what art is - embodied meaning. But that’s just a beginning and by itself I’m not sure will get us very far.

The question for me becomes: what is the nature of embodiment? How does it work? How does it happen? And is there a range to the extent of the embodiment? How do we gauge it? Can we speak of depth in relation to embodiment – superficial embodiment and deep embodiment?

I think we see in readymades one pole of the activity of embodiment: Embodiment enacted out of a clear and straightforward decision of mind; “I choose to place meaning here –” as if giving stage directions, or throwing a ball or simply placing something on a table. “I put meaning here, in this object…Now, it is so…”. Magical thinking. And there is an aspect of thought that is the seed/kernel to all creativity. Our thoughts do indeed shape our world.

But the charge (as in “electric charge”) of embodiment in the readymade pole is weak. The object itself is not saturated with embodiment; this embodiment sort of floats over the object, with a weak energetic connection and the charge runs back to the mind with an idea more than the sense of the object. One doesn’t remain with the object as embodying a felt energetic presence but rather the object serves as a trigger for a mental reference and the energy is stored in a kind of communal philosophical disembodied project that we share and shape through discourse.

But there is no embodied intimacy. Like in a kiss or a touch. There is no sensitivity of meeting, of body, heart, mind and spirit. For that to occur a vastly different kind of embodiment must take place. An extraordinary example might be “Woman Bathing” by Rembrandt.

The question of alchemy enters, of turning lead into gold.