WRITINGS

Stella’s New Name

Guston's Last Laugh

Currin’s Blade

Scavengers

The Good that We Would

Dear Albert,

Pay no heed to my last letter. I had it wrong. I had it all wrong. When I first saw the Stella sculptures I was enamored. I told you they were too beautiful not to love and too cruel not to stay away. They were like bleak Lucifers bearing no obfuscation. The second time I saw them, I had reservations, but I didn’t understand them and I didn’t understand why.

The coolness of the air this morning is disturbing my skin. The petunias and vines in the flowerboxes, which I hope you shall see, are making a recovery. Their leaves were eaten off due to the slugs. Due to my taking forever to plant them and for leaving them in harms way on the patio by the stonewall. Finally, though, all the rain we’ve been having has abated. So the roots have had time to dry out, ridding themselves of another problem. Rot. And now in the undercurrent, I feel another storm coming. The emptiness of the air is thick with wet. My intuitive eye can see it and the flowers sense it too. Far from the slugs, they are safe in their negative spaces. I feel strangely warm. Bring on the thunder.

Negative spaces are the key. They are the affirmations in the sculptures I had seen but not understood. A snapshot take on art can be fatal. What you say about the newspapers is true. And I’ll add that the writers are forced into it. They have but two seconds to contemplate a work of art. They are required to open the petals of small buds while time limitations consume their fingers. This is not to say the challenge of immediate cognition shouldn’t be practiced, only that not much has changed since you were here.

Even though Ken Johnson of The New York Times gave recognition a stellar go, his roots got rammed in the muck. True, Stella gives us sci-fi machines but not inadvertently or to his detriment. It is deliberate. Not the sci-fi. That is not quite the right description. These sculptures are aggressive like monsters in a different sense. They are musical battle plans meant to chew up evil spirits with the elegant indifference of tractor blades. They are distressing because they seem like Edward Scissorhands without the vulnerability and they are hard in the way a man thinks he owns a woman just because she loved him once. They appear to be unsuccessful because they are all about justice without an ounce of kindness. But really, they are beasts stabbing themselves to death with their own obsessiveness. They are not the thrashings of the Great White Whale defending himself. He isn’t there. It’s Ahab. He’s the one doing the stabbing. It’s him that is the beast gnawing at his own sanity.

The sculptures are also reminiscent of magic carpets only they are like big metal flowers with saddles and boats attached. Not like butterflies, though, more like moths. Like Van Gogh’s moth. Maybe you saw it? He wrote to Theo saying, "Yesterday I drew a very big, rare night moth, known as a Death’s Head, with amazingly distinctive coloring…I had to kill it to paint it; it was a pity, as it was so beautiful." Human existence like a Balinese dance is an unsettling mixture of beauty and violence; like a Greek Tragedy where partially self-involved gods ignore the partially self-involved pleadings of those they created and the created do their best to subsume a morality out of the chaos. All at once we feel it is a horror we have to live and a horror we have to die. The moth is beautiful but his beauty will make a conflict out of you. A human skull bone is designed into his wings. There’s no way out.

Unless, you take a closer look. The sculptures are deceiving. For all their formality, which Johnson takes to be predictability, they have secrets yet to unfold. Yes, the work is controlled and Johnson suggests a playful tone might help. But the whimsical is not what Stella is after. He wants blood. He wants what De Stael once told his friend Berger, "Nothing is more violent than tenderness." He wants to move past his formative years when he said, "What you see is what you see." Now his synopsis seems to be, what you see is what you see and what you don’t see. The challenge Stella faces is to find an aesthetic balance between justice and kindness, control and freedom or a way to demonstrate their distinctive oneness. It seems he desires a more mystical approach to his creativity. And that he wants art to be spiritually worthwhile. He wants to have the ideals of Mondrian without deleting figurative symbols. He wants to fill up the empty room of matter with Spirit. He wants the Spirit that is line, form and color without matter as a crutch. He is searching for the accuracy of intuitive transport.

And you, dear Aurier, you predicted this. You predicted if we did not cultivate our spiritual senses we might in a hundred years become beasts. Like machines. Like Death’s Heads, in particular, with skulls stamped into our aluminum backs. It is to this place that Stella has come and he looks to the Balinese dance and its interpretation of Hinduism for guidance. This is why the sculptures emphasize grace and control to purge evil spirits by scaring away the void that would rail against the elegant dance of life; the elegant dance of life with a moral dimension. In Stella we have an example of the faithless gaining a foothold in the faith that synthesizes art with prayer. He leaves undisturbed the written directives on his sculptures saying, "save," "replace," and "inside bend." Perhaps, he wishes to cultivate the finer senses, the ones that aren’t dismayed by the outer flux. And he has stated he wants to make art that "exalts" and provides "pictorial lift." Artistically, he wants to demonstrate that we have more potential to us than as consumers of things; that a person can respond to art with more substance of mind than a base instinct delighting in the bright red of dye-injected meat.

So, Ahab destroys himself in an effort to kill what he loves. And, the beauty of the Death’s Head Moth we kill in order to paint. How do we get past these duplicities? We go to the negative spaces. It is here that Stella’s new work begins to shimmer with reality. Art is sometimes seen as encapsulating the somethingness of something like an insect caught in amber. Art is a capture in a way, but only if the capture is, in the end, a revealing. If it is done to free, to generously take the wayward gnat alit on your arm to the open windowsill. The former art, as a friend of ours says, is "preserved but dead", a symptom of a type of death-motive. The latter involves an inside bend that allows for the measure of the heart to continue. The metal of Stella’s sculptures capture the insect in amber but in the best works, works like Meperas, the negative spaces gain in stature revealing the soul at an open windowsill. In these apparently negative openings, these musical rests full of answerable silence, the subject becomes the object, or the substance, and the object is now but a subject or the story that leads to the life. Stella effectively steps us out of the cyclical argument. The process feels like the metaphor of Jacob wrestling with the angel. At the end, he has a new name.

It is here that the gnat on the windowsill can safely abide, for the blood-soaked harpoons can’t hit what is spiritual. Ultimately, those sharp orange points are only subjective and substanceless on top of that. The artist, Frank Stella, has achieved success. He is undoubtedly the innovator of his genre. He’s done that. Now, he’s completing the story within the story, museums be damned. If he hasn’t already succeeded then he’s well on his way. His harpoon is being fashioned into instruments of dance. His thunder is a drum.

Our hats off to you, Monsieur Aurier, for what you have given us, what was given us before you, is still here.

Jennifer Reeves, NYArts Magazine, September 2003

Sources:

"Stella’s Quest", Philip Leider, Art in America, October 2001.

"Frank Stella", Ken Johnson, The New York Times, June 2003.

"Frank Stella’s Expressionist Phase", Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003.

"Nicolas De Stael in Paris, The Secret Life of the Painted Sky", John Berger, Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2003.

"Essay on a New Method of Criticism", Albert Aurier, 1890-93, Theories of Modern Art, Herschel B. Chipp, p.87-88.