Perpetual Ripplets: Guston
Yuko Otomo
October 2018
The Drawings of Philip Guston
@ MoMA Sept. 7 – Nov. 1, 1988
Why Guston? Why now? Ripplets created by the pebble cast in the water & the perpetual effects of waves, like an echo, are one of the most mesmerizing miraculous cosmic phenomena we can witness. Every creative effort is like casting a pebble into the water. Its effects are eternal if it is genuine. When Guston shifted the style of painting from the one he was known & praised for to something unthinkable & unimaginable, it was like throwing a monumental rock into the water. The impact was too tremendous to be deciphered & to be understood. Everyone was literally shocked, mostly negatively. Even the closest friends & colleagues in the field could not help but showing the perplexed awe & confusions.
In Philip Guston’s life, there were two friendships that played crucial roles creatively as well as personally. One was with Morton Feldman, a composer, whose insights on visual art was extraordinarily deep & undoubtedly one of the most accurate. Another was with Clark Coolidge, a poet whom he met right after the turning point when he shifted the painting style from abstraction to figuration. Feldman whom Guston met through John Cage was Guston’s closest friend since the 50s. Feldman failed to acknowledge Guston’s shift in style at the crucial moment & their relationship got halted unfortunately. He wrote some of the most brilliant essays on Guston & composed a piece for the artist.
Coolidge met Guston through a poet Bill Berkson at the most painful difficult period when Guston was self-exiled in the country further pursuing his call in solitude. They developed an unusually rich friendship because of the shared struggle in pursuit of the new paths: Guston in his paining & Coolidge in his poetry. They were both challenging themselves & the world against all odds.
Guston loved poetry & poetry occupied a major part in his creative life. He did many poem-picture collaborations with many poets. Throughout the history, because of the shared creative spirits & elements, painters & poets are always in good accords forming many amazing collaborative teams as if they see the same sparks of creativity. Even amongst its rich history of the painter/poet relationships, the case of Guston/Coolidge is one of the richest. They understood each other creatively, philosophically & humanly, mirroring one another in an honest empathy.
Inspired by the late spring California afternoon spent together with Clark & Susan Coolidge, Steve Dalachinsky & Tate Swindell in last April, I went back to one of my old journals to read the entry done on Oct. 17, 1988. There, I wrote down what was on my mind immediately as I got back home after seeing the exhibition of The Drawings of Philip Guston @ MoMA. Naturally naïve & awkward, being one of my early critical writings, but I found it rather rewarding to reflect on my own thoughts expressed 30 years ago. Especially it was fascinating to see how I interpreted the crucial moment of the shift of his creative style & the beginning of his new phase.
In order to share it with others, I decided to translate the original written in Japanese into English. I’d like to dedicate this translation to Clark & Susan in an appreciation of the delicious & fond memory filled with scents of lemon flowers blooming in the air.
***
Guston has been “nurturing” me in a very special way with the indescribable & odd suggestive empathy for quite awhile since I first saw his “shoes”. My curiosity was extraordinarily heightened because this was an exhibition of his drawings. Simply stated, Guston is an artist who has searched & struggled to find his own lines & colors & he is the one who has succeeded in the efforts. For an artist, especially lines are one of the utmost reflective proofs of his/her psychic & physical/metaphysical existence.
As the human history has entered the contemporary & modern phases, it is evident to see the fact of an individual personal psyche been taken over by a monstrous vigor of the collective mass psyche. It is fascinating & forgivable to hear Warhol say that we should all be like factory made items as a conceptual statement. But in reality, what we face urgently is a need to recover the deeply slandered & lost personal individual psyche in order to re-establish the healthier natural state of being. Here I do not deny the existence of a collective mass psyche. But most cases, what we see as seemingly a mass psyche is a manipulated & propagated one. It is rarely a truthful manifestation of the collective manifestation of individual psyches. That is why & more so that one of the main purposes of art & an artist in our time is to create to show the proofs of possibilities of recoveries of the genuine “self/being.” To give a chance to fetch a breath to our core essence of being is desperately needed in order to save humanity from the on-going propagations committed historically, politically & culturally.
There are many ways to overcome this problem. Warholian paradox; Duchampian paradox; Dada & Surrealism… artists have been trying to correct the illusions humanity has been forced to believe in. Consciously or unconsciously, because of our inheriting sense of being (idiotically) innocent, we have been unknowingly trapped in many layers of illusions. Many efforts have been taken to recover its vitality, so we can live fully & genuinely in the physical/metaphysical cosmos of time/space we are in. The post WW2 Abstract Expressionism movement in NYC that embraced the migrating force from Europe faced a historically responsible role to re-discover the fresh & genuine human psyche & to prove its realization in art.
A close friend of Pollock, being expelled from the art school together when young, Guston carried his destiny of facing a role of being an artist seriously. Pollock dedicated himself in order to reach the final state of his being via shedding layers & layers of slandered psyches, arriving at the tremendous end result eventually. He tried to free himself from every kind of psychic illusions. With a fine & accurate precision, he overlapped himself onto humanity itself. “To be in the painting” only takes place in the perfect marriage of body & mind. Pollock literally sacrificed his own state of physical/metaphysical being giving us an inspiration as the result. What he searched & got was a horror & a beauty of eternity: death itself.
Guston did the same efforts searching his own psyche, but unlike Pollock, he tried to synthesize the resulting reality, further pushing the envelope, bringing “life” back to the dead end discovery. All through the history, death always captures praises & an approval, beating life. A transcendental air death brings in exemplifies the transparent world similar to the word “god”. It is like a reflective nobility. Yet, to show life breathing everyday human reality that always goes with the world that accompanies filth & disturbances is another thing. It is only possible when the mind that is sublimated on a human level goes beyond its tragic-comical afflictions.
Guston starts on shedding the illusion of a draughtsman-ship first to re-discover his personal psyche in order to reach the sublimation. He throws himself to the process of fall/descending. Pollock literally left this world after his sublimation climbing. Guston takes a plenty of his time in analyzing illusions as he cast them away. In the late 40s after creating superbly crafted early murals, he brought forth the works that exemplified the realization of his new psyche. Illusions we humanity carry is multilayered, constantly growing bigger & more complicated because of its own self-breeding action/reactionary autonomous alchemy. Guston faces his struggle in such a sincerity that does not allow him to do a half-baked analysis or process. Instead, He peals the skins of illusions one by one as he moves on from one dimension to another.
With Autumn (1950) & a group of other works on paper with ink, he seems to be working on colors as if to search true colors in the world of non-colors: black & white. At the point where the artist’s subconscious-ness becomes connected with infinity, true colors & lines emerge. Quill Drawings prevail an effort in a search of lines. Form (1960) & Pleasure I (1961), like Fall & Downward (both 1953) show a spark of a discovery. Stone & Scale (both 1965) are “bright” works that demonstrate an evidence of Guston recovering the idiosyncratic psyche of his own. Here, physical forms express the metaphysical sense of being. They show the joy of recovery as if to sing its purity & beauty. Forms are forms & they are the reality & the world beyond the reality. These works present us the contradictory philosophical fact in the most concrete conditions. We witness Guston’s rejuvenated existential psych getting more & more dynamic & life force getting richer in the group of works done in 1967. Mark; Edge; Haven; Chair & Wave II. It is not an easy task to free oneself from the long history of multi-layered & multi-dimensionally slandered “illusionary” reality of pathology of a human psyche. I see his tremendous struggles & agonizing efforts behind these seemingly “nothing” works. When he accomplishes one aim, he faces the next one in the next dimension. Finally, here, he gives his lines that have recovered its genuine-ness the right to utter “a voice” for the first time.
In 1968, odd images of “triangular hats” show up. The strangeness, some sort of hard to describe kind of oddness, rejects any verbal or logical analysis. It has an ultimate force that you’ll never be free from once you are exposed to. As Guston’s personal struggle ends, his existential relationship with humanity starts to develop. At the point where the consciousness & the subconscious-ness become one, beyond Guston, his “being” creates a symbol/image. There are no “human” intensions behind these symbols. The new psyche: the purity of his being itself creates symbols autonomously & symbols emerge in the realm somewhere beyond his personal being. This demonstrates the cosmic relationship of his individual being & everything that surrounds him. In 1968, a memorably important milestone work Statement gives a birth to itself as the evidence of his lines recovering the existential elements fully. Following Statement & Head (Stranger) in 1968 & then Wrapped in 1969, suddenly, in 1970, works change into red/pink paintings as if they are born out of the crazed mixture of pains & laughter. Soon more new symbolic images emerge in works such as Solitary I (Light Bulbs), Roma, Dawn, Street, Study for Cellar & Boots. The impact is so “absurd” & “odd” that induces viewers’ consciousness to react muttering “why such ‘stupid’ things!” Yet, in its confusion, the true message enters into our world despite of our resisting reactions. It is a kind of magic-hypnosis. No one who sees it can escape from it. It is impossible to “understand” its effects with logic or reason here.
More works follow. Three Heads, Message, Fist in 1975 & then Study for Green Sea & Study for the Wall in 1976. Like Current of 1975, images of a biblical religiosity follow. Two Heads in the Water; Lower Level. In 1980, following Dawn, a new series of acrylic & ink on board starts. Nails & an untitled work of the image of a ladder & a chair on a horizon. These 2 works show the proof that Guston has entered the world of “lightness” after struggling with the weight of existential quests. Guston is a painter’s painter so that it is not easy for a layman to understand the background philosophical & metaphysical qualities behind his works & struggles. The world where he searched & practiced “art as a philosophy” must have filled with unspeakable agonies. What he searched was not beauty or logics. What he did was to expand a metaphysical territory of humanity slowly but accurately with the precision of a scientist.
Art is a flow. An artist is a holy student that carries a moment of the flow. To make efforts to carry on the history is an ultimate declaration of a healthy will for the love for humanity. Guston fulfilled his responsibility carrying the flame on, succeeding it from the various artists prior to him. The heroic image that had decorated Pollock was not given to Guston who pulled down the transcendent elements back to the earth again. Yet, in reality, the struggles Guston had gone through was immensely much more immeasurable.
post-script:
After seeing the Guston exhibition, on the descending escalator, I saw an image of shoes nailed on peoples’ backs as “real”. His works successfully had helped my viewpoint to go deeper. He lets me share his ability to see the essence of being a human.
post-script 2:
Statement (1968). It is a revolutionary work that shows the miraculous moment of a line giving itself a voice as “ends”. For the first time, a line sings its existential autonomy as a line itself liberating from the bondage of its role of being “means” (to be used). Guston’s line. Guston’s voice. From now on, in the world of this ultimate freedom, he can do anything he wants to do.
post-script 3:
A difference between “to use” drawing/painting as “means” & “to create drawing/painting” as “ends.” When it is used as “means”, a creation goes through filters of human logics. So, it never fully succeeds to cause a fundamental shift/change in the world of non-logic where we also live. Guston challenged the limit & won.
_______________
Yuko Otomo is a visual artist & a bilingual poet/writer of Japanese origin. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Genesis (Sisyphus Press), Small Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Hand of The Poet (UDP), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press) & FROZEN HEATWAVE: a poetry collaboration project with Steve Dalachinksy (Luna Bison Prods).
©2024 ARTEIDOLIA