WRITINGS

The Cream Cube

Guston's Last Laugh

Currin’s Blade

Scavengers

The Good that We Would

There we are, beads of sweat rolling down our foreheads, standing, frozen, on one leg, in the middle of the lawn for fear of stepping on the grass. Masses of "sorries" dripping from our noses, we dare not wipe them away for fear of bringing attention to the snot. Intimidated by theorizing, only halfway believed in, we skirt the edges of our hearts failing to reach the cores. So civilized are we, so ultra refined, we are offended by the blood throbbing in our own veins — that bubbling current of religious desire driven under the rocks, threatening to tip us over into the plush bluegrass of conviction. This river, this passion to ponder our purpose in the purpose of it all, a contrarian to systematized stances, is fat with emotional intellect. It gurgles at our ears from the inside out, completely bypassing the clamped teeth in our smiling mouths. Despite ourselves, we, the art world, must yield to these tidings or lose. Lose all our poetic juices to the absorptions of secular dogmatisms.

What is power? Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice writes to us, in his article "Looking Back," about his ups and downs as an art critic. He talks about how dealers and collectors are more powerful than critics. How he’s not always satisfied with his reviews. How no one will care in the future what he has written anyway. How he didn’t graduate from art school. How he made it as an artist for awhile. How he was a truck driver and loves art and craves attention. He sounds like one of those guys who, wanting a date, reveals he’s married in order to prove his honesty, honorability, and love for you. In essence, the stance is defeatist — a position of nobody’s perfect, so let’s be mediocre. No wonder dealers and collectors hold the perceived reins. Yet, the story doesn’t have to end here. There’s more. Critics have power as thinkers if they enter the art and wear it. If they personally respond to and understand poetry as an intricate networking of mind, body and soul. When their standards of judgment stretch beyond how they would create the artwork if they were the artists. Writers are emboldened when considering the artist’s "religion," in other words their philosophical positions, and whether or not these are in effective alignment with the objects made. Possessing fire in the belly, virile observations pro or con, writers can inspire revision and inspire revolt.

It’s simple really. Critics must do what artists must do. Learn how to poise their visions with their passions. Find the pinpoint at which the head and heart are complimentary, are one. I’m talking poetic atonement. A messy prospect because one has to free repressed fears without letting any one of them overwhelm. One has to ride the bucking bronco without the saddle, bridle or confining strap, but still ride. It’s not what the artist, critic or audience wants that is important. It’s what their vision needs. Right, there, is where the true power is. Screw the social power of the mere money mongers. Override the rudderless desire for attention with responses of visionary grit. We must stop wasting time listing comparisons and relaxing in descriptive peripheries. If we can’t say what we think art is and for what purpose beyond entertainment, then what’s the point? Maybe "agenda" should not be such a dirty word. The secularization of aesthetic experience has sucked us dry of profound drive. Profoundly not anything, today’s intellectuals hardly "discuss" the fire in their hearts. We talk about other things of no blazing consequence.

Embarrassingly, the snot is pouring from our noses. Yet, even snot can be a bridge to salvation if we’re willing to cross the bridge. Holland Cotter of The New York Times does surprisingly little to make that passing in his summation of Anselm Kiefer’s latest show at the Gagosian Gallery. Disintegrating into academic reactions, avoiding the full Monty, Cotter sees subject matter and object matter as separate entities. This compartmentalizing of Kiefer’s art misses the glue of the entire undertaking, which is the artist’s devotion to alchemy — the transforming of raw terra into gold or the transformation of unformed thought into formed, enlightened, thought. If an artist’s materials are symbolic of malleable consciousness and art making is the elevating of mind through the blending of ideas, then Kiefer’s propulsion is to join science (the study of matter) and religion (the study of spirituality) into mutual poetics through the inspirations of Jewish Mysticism. In these paintings, we see humankind’s impossible desire to chart the infinite solar system coinciding with the desire to understand the eternal Shekinah or God With Us. For Kiefer these desires, these prayers, are one in the same. The import of which is to be found in the mammoth care with which he demonstrates beyond his materials. It makes no difference if the artist has frequently used "sooty colors" and "gritty textures" to denote his serious intent. So what if he’s partial to greys and browns. Does anyone complain because Mondrian was partial to primaries and whites as a means to express his Theosophical inspirations? Formal elements are "devices" when an artist fails to utilize them according to the needs of their vision not because they made use of them before. In Kiefer’s case, there is a transcendent correspondence between idea and material. He turns grey grit into joy, waves into ladders, horizontals into verticals and verticals into horizontals with the assets of repeated ability. Planted before his paintings, the motion of the eye sweeps in and up like the lift of a buoyant wave suspended in still-frame at the center of the heart. Although the immensity of Gagosian’s gallery invites pretension, these large works are scaled to the Klingon hush they provide. We don’t have to allow the authoritative freeze of the white cube to invade our bridging with the art.

Intellectual dispassion is a lothario to the soaring spirit. His cool seduction masks a desire to confine. Tell him to fuck off and get a life. Untwine his lacey calculating, his moral justifying for indignant meaninglessness cloaking a fear of self-reliant thought. Unclasp the suffocating grip of his presumptive refinements at the throats of our poetic headboards — our beautiful needs, thumping music into the wall with heavy thrusts of the brush. Heed the whisper of aesthetic fire within our ears saying, "Juice me up, luv." Unsnap the leopard print bra. Feel the intake of the held breath. Embrace the Rothko orange tigress with her legs spread. Wide. Do what it takes to make her purrrr and thoroughly creamcoat the walls of the white cube.

Jennifer Reeves, NY Arts Magazine, March 2003