ART: LACMA, Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting

"The dichotomy between figuration and abstraction is untenable. All representation is abstract, and all abstraction, no matter how rigorous, is funneled through the language and habits of mind that are representation.  It's not even that one can't have one without the other, but that they are simultaneous."

Helen Molesworth, Exhibition statement

Amy Sillman

Simultaneous funneling?  Sounds like a hydraulics system - the "black box" cognition theory, a mental "push-pull" process of birthing images.  

I love this painting - it looks like an earlier work by the artist, but the color sense is sure and right, and the shapes are at once playful and beautiful, colliding and then erect on the left side of the painting - a no-man's land if one tends to "read" paintings visually from left to right like a text - which I have trained myself not to do.

The idea that all representation is abstract is of course, fundamental to understanding human perception of reality.  "The map is not the territory".  It destroys the "primitive" use of figurative imagery.  Think of all those stone gods worshipped, the "captured soul" perception of portrait photography.

I wish to expand the idea of simultaneity   beyond a linear metaphor and imagine it as a unimaginably dynamic open-ended process involving time, space, somatic perceptions, and mental constructs - like a Julie Mehretu painting come to life, or those exploding images we see at the beginning of movies.

I chose paintings from this exhibit that I "liked" - a "simultaneous" and seemingly pre-verbal process.  For me, finding language to analyze and explain experience, whatever it is, has a desperate, pressured feeling, like being at bat in the ninth inning with 2 out and the bases loaded. 

My liking of them is not merely an intellectual exercise. I love each of these paintings and feel great energy about them and from them that is entirely an emotional response.

Then the struggle begins, to find the words, for they are hiding in those mental caverns that gave me the experience.

Amy Sillman

Oh what colors here - that grey seems to be delivered direct from analytic cubism, but the purple and sly pale yellow slices of color beneath the coffee pot and the lovely violet and lavender blocks to the right of the forms and part of the forms seems to speak to me: I'm perfect here, this is exactly the way it should be - like a Giorgio Morandi does.  All perfect form but exciting directions and finally harmonious balances resolve within and around the volume and mass of shapes.  All flattened illusion.

Mark Bradford

I love this particular Mark Bradford painting - a welcome and recent appointment to the MOCA board - because I am drawn to maps, directionality, and grids. How easy it is to move among the colors here, then halted short by that dark blocky section, then permitted to move around and above it.  I don't wonder what it is.  It's for me to have color, to move in the blocky, accreted directions and be stopped by the "shoreline" of exquisite mint green. 

I think there's something rather retro 50's about the overlapping blocks and their orange color.  How unstable the crazy blocking seems, ready to tumble but never doing so, making for fascinating and repressive energy within and between the forms and colors.

Bradford's body of work is really interesting to view.  His exploration and direction seems so right, yet so fresh.

This last painting I love, but its a very different painting.  The tactility and tonal quality call me to think of Antoni Tàpies, another favorite painter.  How I love that line moving over the rich and hatched surface.  How puzzled I am by the two triangles seeming to quarrel with each other and the painting whether they are below the surface of it or above.  

And that line - free, swinging, yet compressed from the sides of the canvas and the top it seems, forced to slow,curve and turn, pick up speed again, then slow again, until it arrives at a place which concludes the movement, rather like a work of programmatic music - something earthy, like Dvorak. 

The shapes are doughy, and childlike, and the line seems patient and then scribbly. I love the pressures against each other, rhythmic reversals.  At the same time, it's still  flat, a denial of depth and space even as it references it.  Like maps do.

FILM: The Great Silence

Spaghetti-croissant western with Jean-Louis Trintignant Klaus Kinski, filmed in the Dolomites in a deep snowy winter in 1968, this is a film that ends with a bad surprise.


It's based loosely on the excesses of bounty hunters in the late west, who massacred an outlaw group in Utah that seemed to be Mormons hiding until amnesty was granted. 

Klaus Kinski plays a sadistic bounty hunter named Loco and Trintignant a righteous but mute vigilante called Silence - after he's been in town and the shooting stops, that's what you get.

We're denied the virtual cinematic pleasure of a duel between them, and Silence and his girlfriend both die defending the outlaws being held by Loco in the saloon.

The Dolomites are astonishingly steep and deeply snow-covered, and their looming white silence is breath-taking and compelling.

A shocking and quite good film. 

FILMS: Dear White People, The Skin Game

Go ahead, white people, try making funnies about blacks.  Or maybe not.  My working principle is to only make fun of my own stuff, though these days white female old lady jokes aren't even safe, because then people try to make me feel better because because I'm old. Then I can't own my own age after all.  They don't want to think about their own futures.

I once discussed with a black friend how a white person can work for racial equality without blundering.  Her advice, was, "just keep trying, dear,though you may be misunderstood".  Wise words. Maybe someday I'll get it right.  

In the meantime, I go to PC movies for etiquette coaching, and some that aren't so I can actually laugh. 

A wise friend, a southerner whose special area is Faulkner, once chatted with me about "permission to laugh" at stereotypes, whether those of black comedians satirizing black cultural behaviors, or whites laughing at them.  He advised that we should, because it's just another PC trap not to. It's all in the level of awareness, as I understand his point.

It's a very timely issue - consider the removal of a scene from The Death of Klinghoffer portraying a New York Jewish family scene which evidently had stereotypical Jewish types in it.  Not going to be caught laughing during this opera, no sir!

By the way, this film has a smart, really funny musical score - lots of clichéd masterpieces that stand for the boring, materialistic yet well-intentionededucational institution.  (One time at a party on the East Coast I heard two old guys discussing the size of their schools' endowments - each mentioned sums in the millions of dollars, but it was definitely a "mine is bigger than yours" conversation.)

I liked Dear White People a lot.  Yes, students actually do have racist-themed parties; I found six listed on the web, not all black.  Equal op racism. I'm almost more disappointed with the privileged college fun scene portrayed. Where is the intellectual journey part? It's the back story, you make it out in the distance, as the literary "cuties" try to out-do each other with clever party themes, pretentious literary magazines and blogs.

Skin Game, a comedy western (1971) with a young Lou Gossett and James Garner, is surprising.  Lou Gossett is a free black pretending to be a slave as partner in a con with Garner.  The "n" word is used casually and frequently, racism is presented in all its ugliness, and Gossett fakes black southern slave dialect, and we'd call his acting "coding" his behavior to suit his surroundings - all very non-PC, but the comedy gets away with it, despite my raised eyebrows. It's naiveté and date seem to have slipped it by the PC police.  

In a plantation scene, Gossett's character discovers Songhai Africans kept in the barn as cowboys.  They speak no English, and Gossett, who has pretended to speak an African dialect in an earlier scene, makes up words until after a few missteps, he hits on words they understand, and all become fast friends.  It's such rich send up of fake dialect.

The film does include chains, a whipping scene, slave auctions, the Kansas slave/free vote, and in the framework of the comedy, is very hard-edged and unpleasant to watch - who thought this was ever funny? (Despite my earlier statements about comedy, I still have my limits.)

All the folks Garner cons seem to richly deserve it, rationalizing the deceit,and Garner is a good guy when prevailed upon.