The Plummet-Measured Face

The Geometries of Ronald Bladen

by Mark Daniel Cohen

Ronald Bladen: Sculpture of the 1960s & 1970s

Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York, October 16 – November 26, 2008

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008. Copyright © 2008 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

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

—Havelock Ellis

To understand that which we see, we see ourselves. To know the nature of what we encounter, we invent its nature—we create the sense and insight into something that seems like us, and instigate ourselves that we have found a truth, that we have discovered in depth. But all we have done is fabricate a fairy tale, conjure ourselves into speciously perceiving that all we witness is secretly, inwardly like us—rife with and driven by an inner self that observes and wills, and responds, and lives. And so thereby, we delude ourselves into knowing that we are not alone.

But we are alone. We observe a mirror and perceive it a window—we are walled by glass. We propound a universe that appears to look back as we look at it, which is a close definition of the uncanny. Despite Freud’s rejection of the role of intellectual uncertainty in the affect, it seems inescapable that the inability to determine what is living and what is inanimate—what is staring back and what is not—is inherent in the flavor of the fear as it would seem to be in the revisiting of the “superannuated” belief in animism to which Freud attributes the condition. And the irrevocably ambiguous is unnerving—the line that is not so much crossed as it is smudged to an edgeless and infinite width. Yet with an irony that bears no touch of ironic sensation, it is we who decorate the uncanny to feel we are among the familiar, and the universe withholds and protects its secret: that it is mysterious, that it is incomprehensible, but there is in no sense in which it is specifically uncanny.

None of it is comparable to us. None of it has a soul acknowledging our own presumed souls as it gazes back. What we see when that is what we see is merely us, reflected. And we impute intent, an attitude, a purpose, a role in the drama through which we live, the drama we invent to understand ourselves as alive, imbue it all with import of significance to our lives—with “meaning,” as if it meant something in our regard—with ramifications for us, as we become the measure of all things. In all we see, we inject implications of hope and despair, possibility and frustration, promise and denial, optimism and dejection—judgment and judgment. But none of it is real. It is merely us: alone and fearful that we are alone, incapable of perceiving that there is nothing like us other than us, and that our uniqueness signifies nothing. Beyond our inner lives, it is just a stockpiling of facts.

The attitude of the animistic belief is the very soul of narcissism—the felt dilation of the potency and range of one’s own thoughts such that they become environmental, the sense of living within the omnipotence of one’s own thinking, roughly as Freud put it. And it is, of course, infantile and primitive.

And it has also been the business of art to a great extent. Much of art has gathered its power and applied its effect through anthropomorphization—through treating that which is inanimate as alive and that which is not human as like the human. Literature in particular distinguishes figurative writing from the purely and dryly descriptive through the application of human attributes to that which does not possess them—it is where much of the imagination in the composition goes. Even the passage above, while arguing the insipidity of the practice, practices it—“the soul of narcissism” “enacts” the opposite of its own assertion; “a stockpiling of facts,” as if the facts were being stored by, well, whom?

If one studies the techniques of literary composition—artful composition—one finds that, almost without exception, the more ambitiously and recklessly the author animates and humanizes, the better his rank, the higher his standing, and none did it so well or inventively as Shakespeare. (“The morn, in russet mantle clad.”) The mode services well when the subject is insight into the human condition, into the subtleties of the rules of life and the secrets of the human heart, but it seems the argument must run the other way. With everything possible, under heaven and in the imagination, nothing other at its best than a symbol for human concerns, what else is there to speak of? Where else could we go?

Even painting is, through its history, largely little better: trees spilling with mood, often sinewy, mountains that appear magnificent, Expressionistic cities distorted by bad temper, and even the sublime begins to seem little more than a narcissistic glower, pretending profundity. And music—what else is it but temperament made audible, articulated, scaled?

And it is also the Phenomenological Error: any argumentative ploy by which fact is transposed into experience, by which events are significant only in their perceptions, and the human mind is indispensable to the existence of that which it is not, which is to say there is nothing it is not. It is under this aegis that linguistic analysis, of that which is not linguistic, makes sense. For to examine that which is named by investigating its name is not to explore that which is named, or the individual mind that deploys the name, but group mind—the source of the linguistic application—which is the background condition for the Phenomenological Error. Linguistic analysis made sense for Freud, for his concern was not the Phenomenological conditions of experience but psychology. However, outside of psychological science and its rigors, something insidious is afoot.

And the scientific viewpoint is quite different. There, the specifications of the quality of experience are the warp in the glass, the exploit is for the cracks in the mirror, and there are no meanings—only objective, and perhaps ontological, implications of events: if something happens, what preceded it and what will follow? How does it occur, of its own—even when it is us? There, the world is what it is, whatever it turns out to be, and the truth is the truth, even if it is eternally elusive.

For in the end, Phenomenology is of necessity a subspecies of Idealism. The essential Berkeley position is acquired: all that can be asserted is, not the existence of a fact, but the perception of the fact. To assert a fact is rather to assert the assertion of a fact, nothing more can be inferred, and so there is no truth, which by sleight of intellectual hand becomes again ontological at the last moment, in order to be denied.

It has been the business of art, until the beginning of the last century. Abstraction was specifically an attempt to scrape the backing from the mirror, a try to see through to something not us—to elude the prison house of the personal. Non-representation was a project to drop what was presumed—out of a distinctly Kantian view—to be human constructions and reveal what our own images had been obscuring. One can note the ambition to such “spiritual” advancement towards insight in the writings of Kandinsky, who saw non-representational abstraction as part of a progress of humankind away from “the nightmare of materialism” and towards increasingly refined, subtle, and incisive emotional states, of which his abstract art was intended to be expressive. From his time and until the advent of Formalism—by which abstraction became simply a continuing experiment in new patterns of composition—abstract art continued to pursue roads to the revealing of a reality beyond the apparent, beyond quotidian human constructions.

After something on the order of half a century, Minimalism arrived with largely the same ambition—at least within the aesthetic program of Donald Judd, whose objectives were focused. The intention of his work is to eschew relational perception—to install a kind of Gestalt awareness that would perceive the work in its entirety rather than as a relation of parts. The purpose is to avoid the “a priori systems” he felt typically underlie the art we have inherited and that “express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like.”

Certainly it can be said that, in a broader context, Minimalism is a palpable reaction to the extreme self-projection of the Abstract Expressionism that preceded it, not to mention the Kandinsky program that has artists looking inward—to themselves, to their feelings rather than turning to the world, to the a priori authentically—a procedure as much open to the charge of invoking human-generated imagery and conception as the art it replaces. It can also be noted that Minimalism, by its most basic qualities, is a Platonic exercise, for the formula is clear: to elude the human image transposed onto the world, to find out “what the world’s like,” the artist turns to mathematics, to the imagery of volumetric geometry.

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