Object Lesson
A Propaedeutic on My Drawings and Prints
The drawings and prints I have been making over the past half-decade or so are the tangible expressions of a set of ideas, theories, and motifs that I have accrued mentally, piecemeal, over years of making, thinking, and writing about art. This essay is meant to put some of these background ideas into outline.
I began writing this essay with a degree of ambivalence and even irritation. For many years I hewed to the idea that a piece of visual artwork should require no explanation, and that pure appreciation should occur only on a visual and formal level, with each viewer empowered to make his own appraisal. Ideas and theorems were considered, in this formulation, vague and pretentious, and somewhat almost bullying in their overdetermination. The work of visual art should be allowed to speak for itself.
I now think that this is, if not actively pernicious, at least extremely limiting; but it is also a very popular attitude, one that has a great deal of traction in the ranks of non-specialist educated art viewers. My irritation is defensive and pre-emptive; the only possible reaction to the smug philistinism embodied in the view outlined above is hostility. Its origin is in the absurd idea of “common sense,” which is profoundly tautological, and like most literal-minded systems is completely, and maddeningly, resistant to analysis or counter-argument.
A starting point for liberation from the prison of unilateral, self-contained judgment, for me, at least, is a statement made by the German conceptualist artist Joseph Beuys, who once said that “thought is a kind of sculpture.” The statement is very simple and even whimsical, but upon reflection its truly radical implications begin to obtain and multiply. For one thing, it upends the legitimacy of the self-contained judgment outlined above. It does not posit the visual object as primary, something to which a theory is extrinsic and therefore secondary, something that has a set of ideas buttressing it, as though it were a flimsy surface that needed to be propped up. Thought is a kind of sculpture. What if the visual object were only the physical manifestation of the more complete, more powerful, and more potent set of ideas that animated it? To use the shopworn metaphor of the iceberg: what if the drawing or the print were the tip of the iceberg, the part we see, and the philosophical or theoretical basis was the “real” artwork?
When someone is looking at my prints of numbered, colored squares, or at my drawings of boxes or cubes, stacked or lined up either in a plain visual field or against some imagined horizon, I am unlikely to tell them that they are viewing the crude, simplistic, Platonic visual instantiation of a vastly more important, serious conceptual work. They tend not to react positively to such statements. But in a certain sense, that is how I see these objects that I create.
As with so many things, the influence of Marcel Duchamp can here be detected. In a letter of 1951, Duchamp referred dismissively to “mere retinal painting,” a formulation that has come to be known — widely, if inaccurately — as “retinal art.” (Interestingly, Duchamp was in this letter referring to one of his own paintings, from 1910). The formulation is characteristically insouciant, implying as it does that reacting to formal qualities and aesthetic beauty is a kind of dumb, bestial, neurological reflex, primitive and irrelevant. By implication, the opposite of “retinal painting” is any art that is not limited to its physical instantiation.
Another influence on my thinking in this is the work of Donald Judd; one does not need an advanced understanding of the history of modern art to see in my visual objects his influence. For my purposes Judd’s legacy is not just the shapes, or the formal tactics, but the sense of his manufactured objects as expressions of an austere, powerful, and rigorous theory. Judd was, famously, a philosophy student and a critic before he was a visual artist, and I find something unutterably appealing about the notion of him and his pals Richard Serra and Carl Andre drinking in a basement booth at Max’s Kansas City while arguing about the abstruse theorems of objectivity, space, and substance that would power their groundbreaking artworks. They were hard, arrogant men, burning with ideas and manifestos, living in a city sliding into disaster, and they had no patience for bohemian frippery or loose-minded sentimentality. The mixture of the astringent with the cerebral has always held appeal for me; if there is pathos in my activities — putting aside for a moment the absurdity of an amateur hobbyist writing a 2000-word theoretical manifesto explaining his art — this is where it lies.
Judd’s ruthlessness — especially as conveyed in his totemic essay “Specific Objects,” from 1965 — is compelling to me. For Judd, the idea of a flat, illusionistic surface that portrays some element of the external world was a preposterous sham. The traditional dynamic of art, he said in an interview of the same year, “involves a relationship between what’s outside — nature or a figure or something — and the artist’s actually painting that thing, his particular feeling at the time.” And then, the cool dismissal: “This is just one area of feeling, and I, for one, am not interested in it for my own work.” The great critic Barbara Rose grasped the psychic tenor of Judd’s work right from the outset. Judd, she wrote,
replaces the flamboyant baroque rhetoric of abstract expressionism with a cool impersonality which, nonetheless, often strikes one as stubbornly aggressive … it is direct to the degree of bluntness and severe to the degree of asceticism.
It is exactly this sensibility that I am after in my small attempts at creating visual objects. The box drawings — the pictures of imaginary dolmens or cenotaphs made out of steel or concrete cubes and situated in imaginary landscapes such as seasides or meadows — most closely show the influence of Judd, but the numbered boxes are more deeply and rigorously minimalist. To me, the repetition of the basic form, the extreme seriality of it, has a number of implications that I find satisfying in an allusive fashion.
A key element of this conception originates in an exchange between Jasper Johns and the late writer Michael Crichton. A repugnant man, Crichton was inexplicably not only one of Johns’s personal friends but also, one concedes grudgingly, an intelligent interlocutor who was able, as well as anyone, to elicit and read Johns’s famously gnomic pronouncements. The conversation Crichton recorded as part of his introduction to his book on Johns, from 1973, is essential to Johns scholarship. At one point, Johns is working on a preparatory piece for a print, toying with the compositional elements, and Crichton asks him why he made a particular change. Johns’s response, characteristically elliptical, ends with the statement “I tend to think one thing is as good as another.”
I tend to think one thing is as good as another. This offhand remark represents a radical redefinition of artistic intention. We have been trained to think that the creation of a piece of art involves a lengthy series of formal choices — put the skull under St. Jerome’s desk, or in the corner? place the red streak of paint at the center, or just to the side? — each one of which can go disastrously wrong. Good artwork is the result of a successful series of formal choices. Bad artwork results when choices are poorly made. But what if, per Johns, all of the choices are equally valid? What would this mean?
One (my) answer becomes a question in itself. What would it mean to have a piece of artwork that was constructed with no decisions — or, perhaps, with almost no decisions? Johns somewhere says that he chose the American flag as a subject because the design was so familiar as to be invisible, leaving him free to concentrate on other aspects of creating. In the seriality of the numbered boxes the same concept is at play. Each one is exactly alike; there are no choices to be made, other than the generation of random colors and numbers. It is a visual object whose generation needs no decisions; needs no thought, even. The beauty of this, to me, is the paradox that the process of art-making is purely physical, purely mechanical, while the idea behind the process is purely abstract, purely intellectual. The middle ground — the thought that operates while making the artwork, and then ends there — has been obliterated.
Sometimes a friend or acquaintance will ask me a straightforward question. “Mike,” they’ll say, “why do you keep drawing these same damn things over and over again? Doesn’t it bore you?” (The implication is that looking at them is boring for the viewer.) Leaving aside the corollary idea of inflicting boredom as a legitimate aesthetic tactic, I would answer, had I my wits about me, “no — and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter.” The reason for this is that seriality replaces the idea of the work as unique and different, and thus negates the very idea of boredom. It is a strange kind of magic. Varying levels of execution — skillful or clumsy, successful or unsuccessful — are taken out of the dynamic completely. No one looks at a date painting by On Kawara (another touchstone), for example, and says, “ah yes, this one is especially fine!” All of the elements of the series are equal — none of them has been executed with a level of skill that exceeds or diminishes the others.
This idea of mechanically and mindlessly generating an endless series of nearly identical objects — the valorization of seriality, in other words — is of course rooted in the immense, ever-expanding legacy of Andy Warhol. Trying to explain his praxis to Gene R. Swenson in 1963, he said, “you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.” Warhol’s achievement, to me — with an assist from Arthur Danto, his primary theoretician and interpreter — was the creation of an oeuvre whose visual grammar was at once both immediately graspable and yet also suggestive of immense philosophical and ontological complexity. In Warhol, we see the ultimate demolition of the idea of the painted object as sui generis, a unique artifact; the hundreds of box prints I have made are a small, unskillful exercise in this same idea.
I have all my life been fascinated with stamps, stencils, decals, awls, hole-punches, with any small machine, in short, whose purpose is to make marks. Obviously, the very nature of printmaking, of using surfaces to make marks on other surfaces, is the apotheosis of this fascination. The LetraSet numerals that appear on the box drawings are no exception. There is something ontologically poignant about LetraSet, even aside its status as a superannuated technology; no matter how skillfully applied, it always looks almost, but not quite, completely machine-made. This is why I love it.
LetraSet contributes to the sense of the box prints as what I think of as skeuomorphologically reversed, or as teleologically reversed skeumorphs. A skeuomorph (think of the fake stitching you see molded into the vinyl of a car’s dashboard) is a machine imitating something hand-made; to reverse this teleology is to attempt to make something by hand that looks machine-generated. Instead of simulating the past (hand-made), the box prints simulate the future (imitation machine-made). The combination of this (fetishistic, and therefore potentially annoying) engagement with the old, the antique, the vintage, the obsolete, with the very contemporary fascination with simulations, with surfaces, with mises en abyme, with duplications and replications, is, to me, the essence of postmodernism.
The last element of the numbered box prints pertains to the concept of the absent referent. Another straightforward question I sometimes hear is, “what are the numbers? What do they mean?” This pleases me. The numbers are, of course, random; they have no meaning of any kind, even though they look as though they should. This again touches on the concept of teleology, for the prints have the appearance of an object with a specific teleological purpose (paint chip sample, map legend) without having, in fact, any practical utility. It looks like it is meant to explain something, but the subject to be explained is absent. This is the subtle and understated power of an absent referent. It is a property through which mystery is generated, the mystery inherent in codes, puzzles, snippets of foreign language, discarded user manuals, abandoned grocery lists, and other effluvia of the concrete contemporary consciousness.
When I was a much younger man, my two favorite painters were Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. For both, painting was a romantic, tortured, heroic activity, the aggressively gestural facture an explicit expression of emotions at a fever pitch. Van Gogh’s rippling night scenes vibrated with desperation, addiction, loneliness; the hard-drinking Pollock’s enormous canvases were explosions of color and energy. I relished the machismo, the self-destruction, the early deaths, the strident emotionality.
Now, of course, it all seems faintly embarrassing, all that bravado and flamboyance. Now, I cherish control, precision, repetition, absence, invisibility, disappearance. The ghostly surface of an Agnes Martin, the cool impersonality of a Judd steel box, the austere rigor of a Johns print; these are what correspond to my emotional valence. A row of colored boxes, just so, with the mysterious numbers printed underneath; a steel tower of cubes highlighted against the sky; these appear beneath my pen, my brush, my press, my hands, night after night.
And in the repetition, the ritualistic creation of the same forms, over and over, the almost mechanistic production of highly similar works, there seems to me to be a beautiful, insomniac kind of near-panic; the “cold impersonality” Rose detected in Judd becomes the visual reification of a sensibility that is quivering on the edge of breakdown, and only through a fearsome display of control can retain its self-ness. Now this does not necessarily correspond to my own mood: the creation of these ghostly objects, with their nervous air of obsession, itself generates a species of relaxation and pleasure. When I am making these objects I enter a mental space that belongs only to me. It is always late at night, and there is usually either Depression-era blues or vintage R&B on the stereo, and I have a cold can of lemon seltzer at my elbow, and I am making these cryptic objects, and I am happy.
