Water Ambient Through Water
by Mark Daniel Cohen
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 28, 2007 – January 7, 2008
To download the entire essay as Adobe PDF format |
| right click the link “Water Ambient Through Water.” Select “save target as” to save to your PC.
Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007. Copyright © 2007 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
What we were water ambient through water.
Drawing is a reduction of visual art to its essentials, a drawing perhaps of the principle of art itself down to the essentials. Its character is the character of art distilled, stripped down to its purest form, to its clearest rendition—to the thing itself. Cleansed to the merest of its means, it is the thing laid bare. To discover what typifies the aesthetic—what constitutes the distinguishing aspects of the artistic provocation, of the lyrical amplification, of the singing of existence—one may study what constitutes an adequacy in the practice of draftsmanship. What a drawing is, is what art does.
For drawing is art done without the assembled technology, without the machinery for the transposition of gesture into something other than gesture—into color, or volume, or stage-set environment. It is the artist left strictly to the artist’s own devices, to personal wherewithal, reliant on the thinnest of mechanisms for the laying of the hand—capable, if capable at all, through a stick of burnt wood, or compressed graphite, or medium stained into tones. A drawing is the closest thing to the artist laying hand to the atmosphere—to figures cut in the air. A drawing is merely what the artist does—there is nothing more available to help.
Nothing but gesture, but a drawing is clearly more than merely gesture, and so the gesture is not merely its literal self. This strikes to the core, for in its essential nature art is, and hence drawing is in extremis, an alternative to literalmindedness. Art is an alternate form of thought, another manner of perception and conception, other than the normatives of quotidian/utilitarian negotiation. It is what I once heard love defined as being—a special appreciation. Nothing artistically perceived, conceived, and stated is literally intended, or to be more precise, literally significant. The aesthetic quality of any conception and expression is in the other-than-literal aspect of the statement—in the added substance of it, the superfluous part, the unneeded detail, unneeded for anything but the art of the thing. The art is in the extra resonance.
It is thus that drawing is not to be defined as a copying. It is not concerned with a fidelity to nature, not with a literal rendition, a literal recomposition. Drawing is a composition, a coalescing, of an initial, an anterior stance. An incipient composing, a drawing is then not a matter of realism, not a manner of it. In fact, the devotion of good drawing dissolves the distinction between realism and abstraction, for if one pole of an opposition is eliminated, both go, each being defined by the other. The very issue of realism is an irrelevance. The art of the drawing lies elsewhere.
Drawing is then definable only in terms of drawing. It is a thing sui generis—a thing unto itself, reducible to nothing else, built out of nothing else. It is a result of, an exercising of, a distinctive capability, a unique endowment to see, to conceive—to appreciate. It is a talent, if you will.
And it is something of astonishment to see the real thing. To witness an authentic drawing is like hearing music in virtuoso performance. One is confronting something almost inhuman, something of the essence of what is human but in the purity, the absoluteness, of its rendition, so far past the range of our ordinary natures, a commission so much beyond the limits of ordinary action, it seems nearly alien to us—a thing so purely us that it is nothing like us. Of our natures and yet nothing of our natures—the difference between the representative and the exemplary. There is something shocking in it. We are, in our potential, more than we know, and drawing is our potential realized on its own terms. Drawing is what we are—amplified to the increment of astonishment. Which is to say, merely, that a drawing is an act of love.
There is something of astonishment, and the evidence of the gesturings of love, in the exhibition of the drawings of Georges Seurat at the Museum of Modern Art. Covering the entirety of Seurat’s career, the exhibition includes 138 works, the vast majority of them drawings (119 out of the more than 500 he created, according to press materials distributed by the museum), ranging from examples of his academic training, dating from 1875, to drawings done in the few years before his death in 1891. Included along with the drawings are a handful of paintings, several sketch books, and a letter.
Many of Seurat’s drawings were done as studies for his large-scale paintings, several oil studies for which are interspersed among the drawings, helping to orient those that are pertinent. But the far larger number of the drawings were done as independent works, executed apart from plans for the paintings. Or, more accurately, they for the most part were done to the purpose of developing a distinctive technique, a drawing technique, that has everything to do with Seurat’s primary achievement: the painting style for which and by which he is known—pointillism.
Of course, the majority of the drawings are those one knows to come for—the works in Conté crayon. Developed in the late eighteenth century, Conté crayons are a relatively waxy drawing implement made of, initially, graphite or charcoal mixed into a wax or clay binder. Seurat’s use of the implement is distinctive and masterful to a degree not seen before or since among the principal populating figures of art history. Seurat did not so much sketch with the tool as use it to hone darkness and light. His technique was to stroke the surface of the support with varying, intricately modulated degrees of pressure, rendering an unbroken field of grey that densified continuously across the surface, moving restlessly from light to dark to light. Working on Michallet paper—a paper with a “heavy” tooth, a rough surface—the crayon picked up and emphasized the texture of the paper, precisely what it is its virtue to do. The tonalities of the drawings shift constantly from a black so heavy as to eliminate any visual sign of the tooth (at the greatest pressure), through varying shades of grey that are ridged and intricate with the paper’s terrain, to a nearly pure white (at the lightest pressure). The elements of foreground and background are configured by the modulations of tone. They are not outlined, not defined by evident, denoted edges. Rather, they form before the eye through modulations of shade that have been cast among a continuous field of modulating shade. The figures are not in a literal sense “drawn”—instead, they emerge out of the darkness. They virtually coalesce out of the rendered black, congeal out of a continuity of densifying and rarefying extension—they arise, apparently, out of what they are implicitly and necessarily a portion of.
What is impressive and masterful here is not so much the idea of this technique—the thought of doing it at all—as the execution. The idea of “painting” with a drawing implement—of working continuously across a surface, of “painting” the surface with an unbroken laying on of medium—is, itself, not unknown or less than obvious. What is visually stunning here is the combination of elements in the technique, the application of the idea of “painting” on this drawing paper with this drawing tool. The visual complexity of the continuous tooth of the paper in varying densities is entirely different in effect from the “painting” (with any medium) of a smooth surface of varying hue or tone. If one looks carefully, if one looks properly, what one sees first is not urban scenes or entertainers in a café or picnickers by a lake. What one sees is the intricately textured modulating field—with a keen eye, what one sees is the tooth, in a dance of structure. What Seurat has rendered is not so much figures and settings as the paper itself, as an apparent physical reality, as an evidently thick fact, and, from that vision of continuity, figures and objects and settings seem to form.
At their best, these drawings have an apparent reality of their own, an apparent reality in that third sense: not as physically and evidently (evident immediately to the eye) real instances of worked paper (their literal factuality), and not as evident simulations of images one might have seen in reality, as reproductions of something that could have been observed on its own (their representational factuality), but as objects themselves of an imagination, as dreams made objectively real, as visions congealed, as something subjective become something objective, something conjured by the spell of art. Three distinct things superimposed—the referential simulation, the composing elements of paper and pigment, and the envisioning of the mind emerged from the mind.
At their best, these drawings have a near photographic conviction and power of simulation, so effective, at least with regard to the texturing of visuality, is Seurat’s technique at fulfilling the second function of the rendition, that of representation. In photographs, as in the reality that greets the eye, nothing is outlined, with such an intricate degree of absence of outline that normative visual reality is virtually defined by the lack of the bounding line. It is this fact as much as anything else that gives photography its assumed and apparent extent of “realism.” In works such as Aman-Jean, c.1882–83, as much as one knows the work and knows that it is a drawing, as often as one has seen it or reproductions and knows (one thinks) better than to be taken in, upon seeing the thing in the “flesh,” one believes one is viewing a photographic image, one believes one is viewing a “shot” taken of reality, which one is, as much as if one literally were witnessing that other artificiality of photography. With Embroidery (The Artist’s Mother), c.1882–83, the texturing is precisely right, but the figure of the women sewing is too abstracted, too boxy and simplified and unlifelike (as is often the case with Seurat) to carry the conviction of the unprepared gaze, the conviction that one is seeing or as good as seeing the real thing. But this is as unlike a drawing, or a nominal work of handmade art, as it is unmediated reality, and what one is convinced of, despite what one knows (which is what conviction means), is that this is some third thing, some thing brought straight from the mind and dropped like a pollinating germ into the precincts of our otherwise common and, for some, uncommonly tedious, natural habitat—something of the imagination made tangible fact. This drawing is like nothing else, except its kin.
And so, this and its kin, most of the works that occupy this exhibition, are as unlike drawing as they are unlike all else. And so, we are compelled to ask: just what do we have here and just what is it worth? How are we to judge it? How are we to comprehend or recognize its indispensability, to determine if it has indispensability? It is a question that confronts all avant garde art, and a question that remains with us now particularly, after a century and more of artistic adventure, and as we continue to wrestle over the worth and inheritance, over the implications of the advent, of abstract art, the mode which these drawings and the paintings to which they contributed did much to bring about.
For the fact is, must be, that if one changes the rules of the game, then it is difficult, it is meaningless, for others to subsequently assert the fact of one’s doing well at the game, of one’s “winning” at the game in some way, and it forces those who later witness one’s achievement to seek to devise some standards by which one can be evaluated, according to which one can be lauded to some degree comparable to the dazzle of the accomplishment of what was evidently difficult to do. In short, just what kind of art is this, and is this art at all? For it is irrevocably the case that the mere fact one can do something well does not imply that the thing is worth doing in the first place. That determination still has to be made. What have we got here?
Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
What we unquestionably have here are drawings, for that is what these literally are—it is what they are in the first sense because it is how they are made, it is the principle upon which they are built. And we must begin with the defining standards of drawing, and for that, we can do little better than resort to the requirements of one of the inescapable masters of the medium, William Blake, who made his principal requirement vocably and ferociously clear.
For Blake, it is the line that is the heart, the very essence, of art, and of beauty.
Every Line is the Line of Beauty it is only fumble & Bungle which cannot draw a Line this only is Ugliness[.] That is not a Line which Doubts & Hesitates in the Midst of its Course
The line is the mark and sign of sureness—of thought, of imagination, of the hand in action, directed by the imagination. Hesitation shows, for the smoothness of the line is the result of the unbroken dance of inspired thought. The hesitant line, the broken line, comes of doubt, of falter, of a lack of conviction. It is the mark of the absence of something more significant than mere craft, for craft will not produce it. The beautiful line is the dance of the mind, for all else in art can be manufactured deliberately but the line is more than deliberate—it is certain.
Blake sees the choice in art as falling between two approaches to rendition: the line and the tint.
They say there is no Strait Line in Nature this Is a Lie like all that they say, For there is Every Line in Nature But I will tell them what is Not in Nature. An Even Tint is not in Nature it produces Heaviness.
It cannot dance. And it should be noted that the monumental artists of all eras in our tradition can be seen to resort to the line, to the sure smoothness of a defining lineament, at the core of their conception. To take the matter at its height, Michelangelo conceived along an S-curve—it can be seen in every one of his major compositions. The David, particularly—the spine of the figure demonstrates an impeccable S-curve from every angle of observation—a seemingly, until you see it, impossible conception.
But it is, for Blake, the character of the “Moderns” among artists to do otherwise, to prefer otherwise, and it tells us that the movement to the flushing field of tone preceded Seurat and our “Moderns” by the century that separates Blake from them, that the roots of abstraction have longer tentacles and are deeper in the soil of the imagination than we often believe.
Moderns wish to draw figures without lines, and with great and heavy shadows; are not shadows more unmeaning than lines, and more heavy?
There is more at stake here than beauty, for beauty has import—beauty has meaning. What is at stake in this is what Blake calls “character,” and character is indispensable to expression, as expression is in the soul of art.
But I know that where there are no lineaments there can be no character. And what connoisseurs call touch, I know by experience, must be the destruction of all character and expression, as it is of every lineament.
Such art of losing the outlines is the art of Venice and Flanders; it loses all character, and leaves what some people call, expression: but this is a false notion of expression; expression cannot exist without character as its stamina; and neither character nor expression can exist without firm and determinate outline.
What is at stake is more than art and beauty, what is at stake is that which is foundational to character—it is stamina, and clarity, and it is dependent on the “firm and determinate outline.” For it is the product of the dreaming mind, the insightful mind, and it is centered by what the mind does:
The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the want of idea in the artist's mind, and the pretence of the plagiary in all its branches. How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements?
The idea. To see in art, through art, is to see with the mind’s eye, with the visionary eye—it is to see an idea. And for there to be art, for there to be a vision, there must be an idea. Art is beauty plus the idea, the idea that is beautiful—it is the idea and the beauty that form, that depend on, each other.
The Beauty proper for sublime art, is lineaments, or forms and features that are capable of being the receptacles of intellect; accordingly the Painter has given in his beautiful man, his own idea of intellectual Beauty.
Intellectual Beauty, the beauty witnessed and known by the seeing and incisive mind, is the objective at its height—art at its zenith. And, in the end for Blake, there is something more:
Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. It is the line, or “chaos is come again.” For not just insight, and imagination, and art are dependent on the bounding line, the sure cut of the clarified mind, but life. Without the bounding line, all that is, is lost. Without the bounding line, the mind itself is lost. Without the bounding line, we are deluded, and we are mad.
| page up |
Continue| Reading | Page II