Brice Marden, Richard Dorment and Meaning.
Perhaps the most positively greeted retrospective of an American artist in recent years was that of Brice Marden at the MOMA. I would like, not to reveiw Mr. Marden's show, but to discuss portions of the review which appeared in the New York review of Books written by Richard Dorment. The only information that the New York review gives about Mr. Dorment is that he "is the Art Critic of the Daily Telegraph".(which I believe must be in London). He also has written a number of reviews for the New York Review of Books. It is my guess that I cannot legally quote more than a little out of the review. It is posted on the internet at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19691. The phrases I would most like to quote are all available to you there.
The first sentences begin"In Brice Marden's fifteen-foot-long horizontal frieze The Muses
a skein of muted green, gray, white, and blue paint loops across a
field of light celadon green. Painted between 1991 and 1993, The Muses
evokes a procession of the nine daughters of Zeus as it might have been
carved on the pediment of a Greek temple—except that Marden doesn't
depict the divinities, he conjures up their aura. As the eye tries to
follow the intersecting tendrils of alternately transparent and opaque
paint, nine vertical columns somehow emerge from the ground while at
the same time remaining embedded in it."
In the NY Review, there is a large reproduction of the painting, almost a half page tall and much longer than it is high. The canvas has an overall light green tonality a series of meandering, but controlled lines run over it scrolled and irregular, from top to bottem as well as in a scrawling pattern from side to side so that, at some point, it appears that there was a field, probably with only accidental darker and lighter lines.The colors of the lines seem to have begun with light brown, light gray and light green. As work continued the artist felt the need to emphasize certain shapes and forms over others. At least one of these forms has been outlined on all edges with a darker green, so that it is a closed form. In shape, it approaches an Australian boomerang, only with an extra third potential handle not found on a boomerang, That shape is a little bit to our left from the center. About its own width over to the right another shape, something like itself, the upper part of which is clearly delineated in the same green, appears, and is interlocked with another shape in a darker brown, which changes value as it is drawn. This shape is less clear and more, potentially evocative because of the intermingling of dark green and dark black lines, which leave the eye with more than one edge and ambiguity as to the edge of the shape. The rest of the canvas has no absolute closed shapes, but the colors used for accents in the two central shapes, and their syurrounding are used in the rest of the canvas to provide smaller shapes which have potential for vertical connections, but the connections are very variable and ambiguous. Every once in a while it is possible to pick up a head-like or a torso-like gesture. To evoke a series of nine images out of this work is to deny it connection to pictorial activity. The painting rises or falls on the continuous movements through, around, above and below the shapes. If there is any action which marks the painting as a work of art with a life in its forms, it must be this. However, to pick out nine groupings and say they are muselike, is to deny the painting's action, and therefore call it a failure, whether you want to or not.
However, With some short stops at each of the most absolutely closed shapes, the painting does not work like that. My eye travels fairly fully around and through it all. There are several areas, for example, in the center of the portion facing my right hand, where there is an absence of accents, and where there is a formal and spatial emptiness which I associate with the spaces around objects, in art jargon called "negative spaces". There is another one in approximately the same place opposite my left hand. These are not absolute, nor do they fully fall away or become round. But the variation on the movements over the surface and into an apparent space is changed sufficiently so that it throws the other forms-actually to both the left and to the right of reach of these areas-into a kind of relief, which helps them to fulfill themselves formally. The movements continue, and with relief provided there, allow for a longer period of gestation for the viewer, as he engages the painting.
This is what my eyes do to engage the painting if I act normally, as I would in front of many abstract and figurative paintings, trying to come to grips with their pictorial actions, in hopes that I will suss out the pictorial meaning of its activity. It is exactly how I would look at an abstract Klee, like the late, written landscapes, of which he did quite a few. Please notice that I do not do anything which corresponds to finding nine muses in the forms produced by Marden.
If I keep the title in mind and try to see those images in it, I cannot experience it as a pictorial structure, and it falls as a work of art, before I can find them.
I wonder whether Mr. Dorment has read much in American criticism of poetry, such as the work of R. P. Blackmur? He is someone who recent pages of the NY Review in which he publishes, has said is coming back into favor.
He wrote some trenchant essays about four poets in particular. William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and E. E. Cummings. For two of these he is a useful and understanding critic. He loves their work, Yeats and Stevens. The other two he has problems with as poetry.
His take on Cummings was unusual. There are many things about Cummings poetry to enjoy. The narrative flow, the strange inequality of the lines, the onamatopoetic words, surprising imagery. These are all things I can remember. The finest , is what happens when they are read aloud with expression. They have a lot of music in them. But what he finds unsupportable is that the central image, or trope of so many of his poems is unclear and in its own essence not capable of the weight he puts on it. In too many poems that word is "flower". Where, and he gives examples, what is needed is something precise like "Dandelion" or "Forsythia," Cummings says "flower" and the whole poem dissolves into jelly for him.
It seems to me that Mr. Dorment is turning Mr. Marden into just such a figure in art while he is trying to praise him. I do not think that Mr. Marden can be blamed for what Mr. Dorment finds in his paintings. I can see it, if I look hard. But if I try to experience the paintings in their own terms. That is, what it is that they give to me, what they give is diametrically opposed to what Mt,. Dorment sees.
It is also worth noting that the maximum qualities which Mr. Dorment finds for Mr. Marden's work do require the interpretation of Marden's paintings as versions of the figure, and specific ones; "the Muses" and "Tang Dancer". It seems to me in both cases, he has constructed another version of Cummings "flower." Although his language and Mr. Marden's is not as general as Cummings, the images are. Of course, Marden has named the paintings that way, so it is possible that at least as part of his process he does see images in his work. But if the work is realized without the images, and slavish identification with the images decreases their abilities to function pictorially, then we will have to say Mr. Marden is not so good at naming his paintings. But that does not yet detract from their quality.
Actually, since we have had an epidemic of artists, who, since the AE decades, have named their work Painting number 1 -[through as many came out of their studio that year]. And figurative painters who have the same [Nudes 1,2,3, Etc.], We should be glad that Mr. Marden is trying to connect his abstract work with specific pictorial content. I think doing so is an important challenge for us all. The challenge is to learn the means of metaphoric construction in paint which actually functions to express specific images and emotions in any sort of painting, figurative or abstract. This dealing with forms on the level of pictorial meaning mixed with its extension into both potential figuration and potential emotional meaning is something our painting needs. And, if Mr. Marden opens the door to such considerations he is biting off a big and worthwhile project. Mr. Dorment by seeing it already won, when it is merely essayed, let's the project off much too lightly. I would not be likely to think he has the eyes to see what is happening in many abstract or symbolic paintings, based on his misreadings, here.
Love,
Gabriel
