Departure

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Dan: I'm older, and I'm much less friendly to fuckin' change. Al Swearengen: Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.

—Deadwood

The efficacy of life is held within the grip of memory. Without memory we and indeed everyone we know or have known do not exist. We spend our lives fighting against loss which is primarily fighting against the loss of memory. We manifest things—art, to hold onto the world which we live in. It is within this contentious dance with death that we manifest life.

The tenuous dialogue between memory and existence has grown even more difficult in the digital age. Ideas constructed within the macro world of paint, stone and pencil become much more liminal in the world of bits and bytes. Not only do we struggle with the relationship to digital art in how it’s displayed—computer monitors, televisions—but its preservation and continuation. Since the 1970’s the platform for music has gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to compact discs to purely digital storage and now, back again to vinyl. How is an artist to predict the format which will hold the memories and expressions of tomorrow? Who now owns a betamax machine or a cassette player? As difficult as it is to sell works of art on paper, vinyl or canvas, it becomes even harder to make a living from digital production. As we’ve witnessed with the near death of newspapers and the implosion of the record industry, digital media lacks the tactile semi-permanence of something hanging on your wall. A Bill Viola work requires a monitor whose own technology is shifting every year. Televisions have gone from cathode ray technology to LED in just a few decades. Imagine how we will view our digital creations in 20, 30 or 50 years from now.

What I’ve come to realize however, is that none of this matters. The act of creation must go beyond the desire to hold on and the need for remembering if it is to become universal. The work of Bill Viola isn’t dependent upon a television monitor, it’s dependent upon the themes of being human. One could imagine his work being acted out live or drawn as a graphic novel or written out as a poem. It is the works of art which transcend the grip of memory that ironically live on the longest in our collective recollections and cultural identity. Loss is a starting point not an ending. When we loose someone important to us we don’t also kill ourselves, despite the anguish and sorrow we feel. We inherently understand that living is the point even if we understand very little about how that actually comes to be or why it is we too will eventually die. The 1953 work Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg is a testament to the way art can transcend the confines of memory and become something else, something universal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen a de Kooning before or even if you know who de Kooning was and his importance in the art world. It is enough to understand that one artist erased the work of another. The act of destruction becomes an act of creation.

This year has seemingly become a meditation on death, loss, and memory in my life. Mortality took up a seat next to me in my favorite pub and asked me to buy her a drink. I didn’t invite her to sit next to me and frankly before a couple of years ago I didn’t even know her name let alone hang out with her, and yet here she is, now a permanent fixture on that bar stool. My resistance was, at first swift, because like everyone else, I saw death as a threat to life, a destroyer of memories. Her presence there, forced me to confront entropy in a way that I had always pretended to embrace and understand, but suddenly realized was a pretense. I had disguised fear in a cloak of creativity. Life it turns out is much more like Schrödinger's cat experiment than even I had cared to admit.

Memories are not a box of photographs or a fleeting glimpse in our minds of a time we lived in the past. They are biochemical constructs built from electrical impulses that are stimulated from interactions in the real world as a tool for navigating the challenges of being. Evolutionarily speaking, memories have aided homo sapiens by providing us the foundation to create analogies, make tools, and catalogue our world. Memory has extended our lifespans and allowed us to surpass all other creatures on earth in terms of our dominance as a species. And the way in which those biochemical impulses are leveraged is through creativity and that creativity works by first assailing the memories we have available to us and then seeing how they can be reconstructed in a new way. The collective memory of de Kooning is now the collective memory of Rauschenberg which is really the collective memory of humanity. The symbolic is the real because we are alive.

The exciting opportunities available in the digital realm are the ones that challenge our understanding of permanence not the ones which reinforce our desire for nostalgia, for remembering and memorial. The creative act is an act of destruction because entropy is a natural component of being alive and to embrace its reality is to embrace being. It is also an impossibility. Matter is a constant in the universe and although it desires a state of equilibrium it is a constant. Staring at the Erased de Kooning Drawing brings us closer to that knowledge of equilibrium and a little closer to understanding the nature of being.

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” ― Jean Baudrillard

Painting the Wraith

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."

— David Foster Wallace

We sit in rapt horror and conflicted emotion when reading Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men whether man or woman. Being a man I can only speak to that gender. The “interviews” conducted throughout the collection of short stories, for a female researcher who’s own character is a composite of those she interviews, form a unsavory landscape of the male ego. As a man you feel conflicted by your want, if you have any shred of dignity or empathy toward women, to feel disgust and repulsion toward many of the comments by the interviewee’s. Unfortunately, you also feel a tinge of identification with them as well. Within you is the understanding we are complex and confused animals often at the mercy of the opposite sex (and hope the opposite sex feels the same, but our fear prevents us from asking). This confusion takes on the form of gamesmanship, whereby we attempt to out-think, out-maneuver and out-wit women in what we believe an elaborate plot to unhinge us, leaving exposed, an empty shell of bravado, hubris and testosterone. Checkmate! Queen takes King.

In the early 50’s Willem de Kooning produced a series of portraits that helped form the foundation of Abstract Expressionism. This series of six “Woman” paintings created between 1951 and 1953 are evocative of the ambiguity Wallace so adeptly portrays fifty years later in his collection of Interviews. de Kooning’s relationship with women and specifically with his wife Elaine, was as complex as any of the interviews in Hideous Men. The power of the “Woman” series is in their ambiguous approach both physically and psychologically in portraying women. On the one hand these paintings are abstractions of women that can be seen to objectify (exaggerated breasts and big eyes) women as sex objects intended solely for the male gaze. This was the model moving through the sixties prior to the women’s liberation movement, and arguably remains a steadfast fixture within our culture today. It is also, under the surface a revealing gesture of the desires we are hardwired biologically to express to procreate. Abstraction after all is a simplification of the truth, the truth of seeing. de Kooning felt these desires and complexities of human interaction as a way of pulling previously unquestioned gender roles into the 20th century. In all likelihood, this was an unconscious act resulting in the paintings. Willem’s love for Elaine ran deep and despite a protracted period of estrangement and contention they never divorced. Elaine tirelessly promoted Willem in the early period of his career and is credited with his meteoric success much in the way Lee Krasner promoted her husband, Jackson Pollock. Elaine was a force to be reckoned with and despite working hard on behalf of Willem, built her own career as a painter and writer. Willem’s “Woman” paintings reflect the intense psychology, specifically of Elaine but of women in general. The powerful expressive quality of his brush strokes and color emulate this intensity, this hidden power within all women. Willem de Kooning’s Woman III is the Venus de Milo of our time, the winged Nike of Samothrace. It is homage and objectification, desire and respect — in essence of a majestic abstraction of the female archetype for the 20th century.

The postmodern age with all of its simulacra and simulation has confused and distorted our most basic of human understandings and emotions. As the writer Chris Hedges says we live in a kind of “moral nihilism.” In his latest book, Empire of Illusion he says we live...

“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous.”

It is precisely this continuously layered irony with which Wallace was enamored. In his masterfully written expose on television E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, Wallace writes;

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

Willem de Kooning witnessed the birth of this ironic purveyance in the early fifties with the prosperity that followed WW II. A dutch expatriate he had the background of a European, steeped in history and culture and the hubris of an American living at the beginning of it’s ascendency as a global superpower. Watching the apocalyptic conflagration of WW II left de Kooning and other European artists with utopian visions that hoped for a world of unmasked sybaritic desire and expression. Women, for de Kooning, became an iconic symbol for such utopian desire as emblematically embodied in his wife Elaine. However, much like Wallace decades later, de Kooning soon found that embracing womanhood solely from the perspective of a male dominated society was enough to grasp the complexities and dualities of the genders. As human’s we seek patterns and solutions to the complexities of life but seldom wish to recognize the paradox that produces in leading ever more questions. Artists do their best to lay bare these ambiguities in life so that we might find solace in beauty and just enough respite to contemplate our own blind, perfunctory postmodern drive to make the world simple. Wallace like de Kooning, laid bare the inherent confusion that comes with being a heterosexual man in the modern era with the hope of showing us all a road back to our most basic humanness. It is precisely the confronting of this ambiguity which offers us a way out of our multi-layered ironic existences. Men often confront women as wraiths, transparent visions of a more fully formed person that seems always out of reach. The uniqueness of the opposite sex should be seen as an apparition of emotional confusion whose dimension we don’t understand, but rather a human partner with a different biology sharing with us the human experience. We must not be spellbound by the wraith but metaphorically paint her into existence in order to free ourselves from the prison of absolutism.

“If I knew where I was sailing from I could calculate where I was sailing to.”  —No. 6, The Prisoner

right-hand image: Willem de Kooning, Woman III, 1953, oil on canvas.