The Form of Feeling

by Mark Daniel Cohen

Raoul Hague: Selected Sculptures 1962 – 1975

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, September 11 – October 25, 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

There is no whole self. Any of life’s present situations is seamless and sufficient. Are you, as you ponder these disquietudes, anything more than an indifference gliding over the argument I make, or an appraisal of the opinions I expound?

I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality”

One can strike hard and deep, and not make a dent. One can aim true and drum up falsities for every move one commits—for every truth one has voiced, or sung, or carved. One can dedicate a life to blowing the dust from piling estimates of dulling wits and be greeted at every turn by nothing but the nullity of the dead eye and the soundlessness of the mincing ear. One can clarion the foment of insight and be handed only the fearful yawn of the vacuum of marketplace thought and the haggle of pedestrian value.

One may do everything right, and reap the benefit of nothing. It is something many are learning now, at a time of failing promises in the pale, ever graying corner of material maintenance. The absence of guarantee is the expenditure we commenced from the start, for it is the toll at the gates of freedom. There is no one to insure our outcomes, and no expenses we can pay that reserve our due, for nothing is owed us, and no one would save us who would not control us. And if we feel we have been assured of our success, it was a self-assurance, and hushed in a false breath.

Which is to say that artistic reputations and registers of worth are worldly and keep no faith. There have been artists of all periods, no doubt, and most to the point, for we know the victims, ours who have been overlooked, who have committed works of extraordinary accomplishment, who have fulfilled the demands of both their personal visions and the requirements of the general acknowledgement of the vocation and have suffered ignorance and the barbaric disregard of simple inattention. And that is to say that, in all likelihood, we bury many of our Michelangelos, our Shakespeares, our Beethovens, unknown. There is a stubborn, ill-mannered obliviousness of appreciation that the manners of keenest vision accrue—the redemption for their volunteerism to Herculean labor.

We should all know better, and yet there is no reason we should—or should be able to. Artistic reputations are made, and the histories of art are written, by dint of marketing, promotion, and self-promotion. Our attention is turned to where someone turns it, and few of us—we among those who make an avocation of observing and learning from the art being made around us—choose to focus our scrutiny on that which has been selected from among all that is being created. We examine what has been put before us, what has been previously portioned out, and what has been chosen is what the art market throws up, what someone at some point has placed his money on. Because our attention is curtailed, regardless of what we dismiss, whatever we applaud almost invariably is what someone has shown us for the sake of his bet. And to say anything, or nothing, is to work for him or for one of his competitors.

The superb, inspiring, much-missed art writer Arlene Raven once told me that, to know anything about contemporary art, one must visit the artists’ studios, not the galleries, for the galleries by and large show only what the market has already approved, or derivatives thereof. To know what artists are doing, one must go and see what artists are doing, not what the market is selling. But even this approach has devastating implicit limits. If to know anything, one must know everything—not merely what has been previously winnowed by someone else’s judgment or by blind circumstance—what can one credibly know? And, even seeing all that is humanly possible, is it possible, are we prepared, to refuse to select anything? It is not a logical absurdity, not even an unlikelihood, that all works of art at a given moment would be worthless. Are we in a position to say so? And if not, what can it mean even to say that something is the best we have when something has to be selected? What can “best” mean, and how would we know? It is comparable to saying that we have made a free choice in an election or in an award that must have a winner on schedule. We are, at best, making the best of a bad situation, for what can it mean to anoint something as worthy when we are not capable of saying everything is worthless? Value becomes an accident, a byproduct of circumstance. It is all a matter of situational ethics—excellence a matter of what is best under the circumstances, in a circular argument that fails to make even a single revolution.

And so history is the tale of salesmanship, and excellence is an orphan, hoping for recognition and adoption in a world in which every well-intentioned person is unwittingly waiting for someone else to go first. One would like to think that philosophers of art would be those dedicated and best positioned to exercise freedom of judgment, to manage an estimation of value without slavishly following the demands and directives of the art market, would establish the clear vision out of which an authentic history of art could be composed and mean something significant by the judgment “good,” with the definition of the term preceding that to which it applies. For of all the attributions one might think to apply to the occupation, seeing clearly, one might consider, would be the single defining characteristic of a philosopher—that alone would be enough. But, it appears more likely they are often the most ready victims of the labyrinthine vagaries of value calls and have created the industry of spinning marketing ploys into theories of ostensible aesthetic innovation. And to observe a truly free choice in the name of intrinsic merit—that would be an astonishment.

Art is a market-driven story, a function, in its very definition, of what must be said for profit. Yet, there are galleries that follow their own visions, not of what should be exhibited for keeping up with the times, but what should be exhibited for the sake of merit, of intrinsic worth. And there are, time and again, individual exhibitions that are lessons in what we have overlooked and should have noticed, should have given our attention, for the good sense of having done so.

The exhibition of five sculptures by Raoul Hague is an instance, one of a series of shows of Hague’s works over the years that have been attempting the same goal—to bring attention and an appropriate degree of regard to the work of a sculptor who has unfairly and through mere circumstance fallen out of the story of art, a story in which he should have a certain pride of place. The reason for his obscurity is not difficult to understand, and it is a situation facing a number of recent artists of onetime stature: all of them were sculptors, and sculpture does not sell, so there are few galleries devoted to sculpture, so little attention is paid by anyone else. Along with Hague, one can think of Reuben Nakian and Ronald Bladen, as well as a host of sculptors in the last stages of their careers who need now to concern themselves with retaining their place in the story of contemporary art, for without marketing themselves even at this stage of their work, their achievements become eclipsed, because those who compose the story are concerned with recounting what has happened—which means what has been made to happen—rather than what should have happened. (But then, many advanced thinkers of our time, and of most periods, have a particular problem with the issue of the “should.”)

Raoul Hague was an abstract sculptor of the generation of the Abstract Expressionists. He began his art career in the 1930s and was included in the 1933 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “American Sources of Modern Art.” By the 1950s, he had turned to sculpting in wood exclusively, making his body of work a distinctive contribution to the high point of American Art and of the American contribution to abstraction, the principal accomplishment of visual art in the twentieth century.

The five works in the current exhibition—which are accompanied by a video on Hague’s life and art—are prime examples of his mature sculpture. Carved from boles of trees and standing roughly from four to six feet high, the works are enhanced and purified composites of natural forms, compounded sweeps and interactions of wood, as if individual growths had intersected and passed through each other, fashioning an impossible but entirely plausible architecture of timber.

Thus appears the quality of Hague’s principle of abstraction, but as with all abstraction, it is not the quality of the non-representation that is revealing of artist’s aesthetic, but rather the quality that vitiates the evident abstract intent—the quality that worms to the heart of all ambitions not to represent.

Abstract sculpture, when it has been raised to the point of a true aesthetic efficacy, operates according to a principle of reference, as, in the end, all abstraction must. Sculpture that holds no clear resemblance to anything in observable nature reflects rather a resemblance to what is not to be found in nature. There is—presumed by the practice and voiced overtly by Henry Moore—a catalogue of forms available to the imagination that is universally shared: shapes, as Moore wrote, “to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.” There is a vocabulary of pure form that the sculptor may rifle and exploit, and to which the witness of the work may refer.

And from those forms come associations, connections to meanings and feelings that become evident only when the artist has reified them and raised them to conscious attention. Those connections are what Herbert Read called “correspondences”: “real but irrational associations between disparate objects.” “Irrational” is difficult to construe in this claim: if the associations are reproducible, then they are rational; if they are not repeatable, then they are indiscernible. However, what can be detected is that “correspondences” are relationships between things which are otherwise unrelated, relationships that exist only under the aegis of the artistic mood—and that is a principle of organization which is of the essence of Modernism, in all the arts.

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