WRITINGS

The Evergreen Will

Guston's Last Laugh

Currin’s Blade

Scavengers

The Good that We Would

Human will commits violence even as it seeks to honor life. It destroys the garden of individual hopes even as it wishes to preserve them. This Garden of Eden flowers with falsity. Serpents talk and fog pretends to be a sunny day. The foliage of self-knowledge is chopped down and spiritual growth is trampled. Here, that which is detested is harbored and that which is loved is cast away. All is justified in the name of God, of course, for the good of the species and for the stability of the world. The crops are harvested only to rot in the barns and any protests fall on deaf ears. Human will, this strangling desire, knows not what it does even as it hides what it does. Human will, this breathing desire, knows what it does even as it resists what it does. Duplicitous, it is our chaff and wheat, our weakness and our strength, our nothingness and our somethingness, our enigmatic Eden. Full of promise, the rivers are all dammed up. What an ambiguous mess.

Such is the realm of intended exploration for artists of political concern. The restoration of dignity is their call to arms. Defiant, they look directly at, while looking directly beyond, the strip-searching of humanity’s soul that comes to degrade in the forms of prejudice, poverty, war, and disease. Against all hope these socially minded ones hope anyway, creating against all odds. Against all odds, because, really, who cares about some artwork bringing attention to the benefits of clean air? Until one day, a cubist painting, unconsciously overlooked, suddenly becomes a thorn in humanity’s foot. Suddenly becomes a power that compels The United Nations to cover it up. Nothing may be changed but some aspect of where we’re at is revealed. Thrashing about in the thorns, multitudes wonder whether or not current actions are necessary evils. What is the appropriate response? How do we go beyond the dualistic Eden? And specifically, for artists, when does political art become Art, transcending the informative detail and embracing the responsively relevant? In other words, is it enough for art to be communicative or is there more involved?

Donald Moffett is a politically minded artist who faces the onslaught of questions with paint, video camera and an eye for beauty. Concerned with more, here, than the rights of ear mites, he bugle calls for the rights of courage itself. Courage–that lowly crab grass of the garden, that underdog of underdogs in a world of despair bursting out from under the table and frightening the cowards. Moffett, starting with a social observation, seeks to honor bravery. Conceptually and demonstratively, he celebrates the likes of Barbara Jordan (a civil rights activist and politician) through the affirmative action of creativity. Due to his working abstractly, the viewer may not know the specific sources from which the artist derives his inspiration, but it makes no difference because with or without reference points the same results come into play, the results of art.

Moffett’s show, "The Extravagant Vein," at Marianne Boesky Gallery sucks up the mind like a vat of quicksand. Stunned, the eyes want nothing but to stare and tell the body to sit down and be still. For, here, is Paradise revealed. It is The Garden of Eden, so breathtakingly beautiful that all breath is held in and forgotten there. Visually, it’s like being underwater, like being in an underwater Eden. At first the paintings seem still until slowly the realization dawns that the tops of the trees, the hairs on the nails on the fingers at the ends of the branches sway. Literally, they sway, as do the summer breezes in a Turner watercolor. Two swishes of the brush, two heads, seen in the distance along the winding path rise and fall in conversation. It is the ultimate picturesque scene. It is the perfect setting. Oh, to be there. To be walking on that path.

After a moment, one’s chin decides to take the walk and the body automatically rises from the bench for a closer look at the paintings, to feel them by taste. Simultaneously, the mind notices other faces in the gallery lit by the fantasy upon the walls. They look like the stage-lit faces in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Green. We are mesmerized. What are we looking at? We are looking at a slide, no, a video, of a park scene projected onto a minimal abstract canvas. The camera is still but the world is blowing. That’s why the trees move. Approaching one of these simulated paintings, pupils are jolted at the confrontation with a silver glare. Nothing can be deciphered but shadow, your shadow, which is difficult to see after staring into the sun. Revealed to be empty silhouettes, the garden, the pathway, the trees, and the promise of companionship disappears. Poof. The warm breeze turns to a freeze like a mouthful of sand. At this point I remembered an old country song a man sings to his horse in the desert: "Don’t you listen to him Dan, he’s a devil not a man and he spreads the burning sand with water. Cool. Clear. Water." It is a rude awakening. Eden is a mirage.

Later, informed by the gallery press release, one learns that this park is a portion of New York’s Central Park where gay men go to meet and bird-watchers look for birds. Upon closer inspection, one can see the canvases are pocked with painted holes, which may signify the bullet wounds of social injustice. One work is painted an iridescent red that looks exactly like blood. This makes sense because in the next room Moffett provides a group of drawings he made at the trial of a man who engaged in a hate crime against homosexuals. Persecuted because his last name was "Gay," he completed the round of hatred in a blaming murderous rage, walking into a gay bar and shooting. All of his family changed their names. It seems the garden of society, of togetherness, is not so loving and not so together. Another association gleaned from the spots on the canvas may suggest aids. Perhaps, this alludes to the unknowing transmission of a fatal disease, tragically, killing one’s friend and one’s self. Or, perhaps, this alludes to the garden of companionship marred by those who neglect to tell their partners they have a deadly STD. Whether flying for pure love or flying to escape, we are as fragile as the birds. The artist deftly illustrates a multi-layered composite of the world’s complexities with all its thorny patches.

Moffett is a formidable talent, but yet to be disclosed is a fuller round of intensity. The art, here, is almost perfect but not quite because the pathos is not complete. A small gap in the artist’s procedure remains. Simply this, the illusion of Eden is destroyed but the inhabitants are left to despair. We, the viewers, are left with a mirror of what we lack. And this is not enough. This is not enough to make art Art and bypass social issues that may no longer be vitally relevant in years to come. Moffett’s sensual and emotional capacities are not pitched to the high degree that his intellectual and intuitive ones are. The video paintings are wanting in texture and sensitivity of touch. Up close to the canvas and without the benefits of projections, one feels a backing off from intense focus. The surface of the paintings although somewhat considered seem halfheartedly slapdash. They could use more of the artist’s innovative spirit and compassion. Even the drawings appear to have the same problem and, probably, this is just a matter of practice or patience or both. The lack of concentration in execution is indicative of the need to go all the way in the connecting between body and mind. There is no need for a change in concept or imagery only a further sensitivity in rendering. Then, the art will mirror what humanity has as well as what it lacks with a unifying care. It is the difference, say, for an actor, between playing a part and being the part. Likewise, it is the difference, for an artist, between ambiguity and mystery, between pity and pathos, between resignation and resiliency. One stance comes from a source of weakness, the other from a source of power. A power Moffett already demonstrates to heightened degree. One more notch and a real garden will materialize, entirely alive and full of birds. There will be a hand there to touch even though the ending is sad.

Jennifer Reeves, NY Arts Magazine, June 2003