Mandarin to Stumblebum – Philip Guston and the Right of Figuration
Speaking on the idea of the image in isolation in 1960 Philip Guston makes clear his thoughts on the disingenuousness of abstract art. He says that abstraction is a fallacy and one that distracts us from the questions that art should ask. He also says that we should be image makers and it is only by doing so that we will discover the truth about painting. This is only possible through the depiction of forms and images and it is by their application that we will experience genuine feelings of freedom and sublimity:
‘There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth that we inherit from abstract art: That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is “impure.” It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting’s continuity. We are image makers and image-ridden. There are no “wiggly lines or straight lines” or any other elements. You work until they vanish. The picture isn’t finished if they are seen.[1]’
Guston’s dramatic move away from abstraction came after a very successful career in it. In doing so, he asks questions about the authenticity of the sublime experience in relation to non-figurative art. He asks us to consider notions of ‘truth’ in an artwork and says that if we are to gaze upon paintings which contain predominantly unrecognisable forms then a genuine transcendence of thought cannot take place. We see him building up a bank of recognisable domestic images, returning to them repeatedly in his later career and we ask, how can the depiction of primarily household objects challenge something as widely acclaimed as Barnett Newman’s ‘theoretically qualified’ notion of the sublime? Gilbert-Rolfe writes for example that:
‘Others have seen the New York painters of the 1950s, Newman among them, as an American version of the German romantic sublime, an art concerned with the overwhelming and with the idea of density as an idea of acting out, a sublime severe but atmospheric and engulfing rather than hard and resistant.[2]’
We must ask, how can Guston provoke sublime reaction by painting shoes and clocks compared with the all-consuming impact of his contemporaries’ paintings, and indeed, his own among them?
By adopting a position away from the metropolitan gallery driven art scene, Guston placed himself at the periphery of the art world. It is widely considered that the evolution of the sublime lay in the phenomena of artists such as Rothko, Pollock and Newman. The struggle to ‘break through’ the ambiguousness of abstract art with a return to figuration was seen by many as a step back in this evolution but this struggle mimics the idea of breaking through to achieve transcendence. The status of the image is one that we now take for granted but, during the era of the powerhouse all-American macho intelligentsia, it became a thing of artistic ridicule. Pop art could only raise its status once more by adopting it as kitsch – rashes of in-jokes via plastic repetitions and concepts. Guston fell between the two camps – the intellectual abstract loftiness of the high sublime and the ironic image fuelled cynicism of Pop art. He decides instead to cling to the familiar and everyday and, in doing so, raised more questions about the idea of the sublime than we had thought possible:
‘So that I felt that maybe there’s an ambiguity that I haven’t even dreamt of. In other words, what would happen if I did paint a simple object like a book or a hand or a shoe? That finally became to me the most enigmatic of all. It seemed to me like an even greater enigma. Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity. It’s a different kind of ambiguity I wanted. I was weary of that whole thing that had gotten so accepted, which made it repulsive to me and thrown back to my face again and all that. An ambiguity that became so different and generalized that there was nothing left of it anymore.[3]’
Ashton writes of Philip Guston’s desire to feel what he called a feeling of ‘freedom’ in his early career:
‘The experience he longed for – recorded so often by Pasternek’s “world’s best creators” – was to feel a reality in the work more vital than any known emotion, and more seductive.[4]’
At a time when Guston was painting ‘close-up’ visions of whispering abstract delicacy and primitive ink drawings, his cultural sphere was made up of people who created works full of imagery and people from the everyday world – drawn entirely from real life. From an early age he admired the work of V.I. Pudovkin whose processes echo that of the artist in his later career. He spoke of building a film, rather than shooting it and said that the ‘structuring’ of an event to capture its happening on screen was central to the art of film making: ‘Pudovkin recognised that an artist, using materials drawn from life (objects and people), was nonetheless functioning as a creator, that the composition of forms was central to his art.[5]’ Guston’s primitive ink scratching and whisperings were a far cry from the instantly recognisable, heavy ‘common objects’ of his later work but in creating them he began to ask questions regarding picture plane, dimensionality and the figurative image. (Fig.2) He called the process employed at this time ‘dissolving form’ but in doing so, wished to ‘locate the traces of form in space.[6]’ (Fig.3) Ashton writes:
‘In Piero he had understood that composition was based on extreme attention to the location of forms in space. In painting nothing is more difficult than that. What he sought to do in this long series of drawings, in which forms are released from specific context and yet are made to subsist in a small universe created by the artist all at once on the pages, was to “locate” an image.[7]’
For almost three years Guston limits his palette to black and white – forcing boundary and structure in order to find continuity and recognition in the work. He speaks of wishing to find release – a double-experience whereby one has created a new image and yet innately recognizes something of the self in that image. This quest for self-recognition in form shapes the basis for Guston’s desire to experience the above-mentioned feeling of ‘freedom’ – an intense feeling of understanding and epiphany in one’s own painting. In 1965 he expands on the process to Harold Rosenberg, saying:
‘In the last years there’s been, obviously, no colour. Simply black and white or gray and white, gray and black. I did this very deliberately, and I’ll tell you why. Painting became more crucial to me. By crucial I mean that the only measure now was precisely to see whether it was really possible to achieve – to make this voyage, this adventure, and to arrive at this release that we have been talking about without any seductive aids like colour, for example. Now I’ve become involved in images and the location of those images, usually a single form, or a few forms. It becomes more important to me simply to locate the form.[8]’
This deliberate and protracted process leads to what some critics call a ‘moral choice’ for the artist. He rejects abstraction and begins to narrow down shapes and lines into Klan hoods and mountainous bulbous heads. Roland Barthes in his essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ states that if our reading of an image is satisfactory then our analysis offers us three messages - ‘A linguistic message; a coded iconic message and a non-coded iconic message.[9]’ While the first linguistic message is independently read, the viewer receives the other two simultaneously – both the perceptual and the cultural readings come together. There is a relation between the sign and the signified which prompts the viewer to draw upon a reservoir of cultural knowledge. The emergence of symbols and imagery in Guston’s work now allow this to happen. He explains the importance of this, putting himself firmly in the figurative camp in 1958:
‘I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.[10]’
Doreet LeVitte Harten, like many authors, places the sublime firmly at the feet of Guston’s Abstract contemporaries. She describes it in terms of ‘etiquette and court manners.’ In order for a sublime experience to occur there are a number of criteria necessary and rules to follow. In terms of American art she says that Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, rather than Guston, are the founding fathers of sublimity:
‘The sublime was to be abstract, devoid of all signifiers, so that which is signified will appear in all its decorum: that is, by stating its not being there it will have the appropriate Parousia, the manifestation of the hidden experience.[11]’
We are reminded of Kant, who spoke of a cerebral dialogue taking place within the mind – a ‘mental movement’ where, the shifting of thought beyond the minds dependence on the physical senses leads to double-mode of experience. This mode of mathematical sublime allows for an experiential idea of reason and we again see the sublime shift away from our engagement with the physical world to an internalised response – from the phenomenal world to the noumenal or supersensible realm. This echoes Burke’s treatise which places the sublime firmly in our capacity for thought – a secular argument where a God complex is no longer required to authenticate our response to greatness. If it is to be found in the self where does this put the status of the image? If the sublime previously lay in the appraisal of the lofty mountain and mighty seascapes in the natural world, and if it has shifted in terms of philosophical evolution to be exclusively an ‘experience of the mind’ – one that requires no recognisable form or image to authenticate/verify its existence, does this mean that the question of the sublime has been fully answered? Many seem to think that it is with LeVitte expanding:
‘The application of a negative theory in the arts, a theology which is based on the idea of aphaeresis (the coming to the essence by way of abstraction), haunts us still. It is therefore difficult for the catechist to see the sublime in a popular or figurative form … an endless theoretical field sustains the weakness of the image, chased out of pictorial paradise.[12]’
Originally at least, it would seem that Guston agreed. In the 1940s he was preoccupied with ambiguousness and metaphor, putting as much importance on the idea of space and scale, which became ‘as charged with meaning’ and were as inevitable to the compositions as the figures themselves. However, writing on a scrap of paper found in the artist’s studio after his death by his daughter disputes this. Guston, it would seem, was always uncomfortable with his career as an Abstract Expressionist and went so far as to denounce abstraction and its role in the cultural demise of the American people:
‘American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be ...What a sham! Abstract art hides it, hides the lie, a fake! Don’t! Let it show! It is an escape from the true feelings we have, from the “raw,” primitive feelings about the world — and us in it. In America. Where are the wooden floors — the light bulbs — the cigarette smoke? Where are the brick walls? Where is what we feel — without notions — ideas — good intentions? No, just conform to the banks — the plazas — monuments to the people who own this country — give everyone the soothing lullaby of “art.”[13]’
Guston’s great friend Ross Feld was convinced that he had only ever seemed to be an abstractionist throughout the fifties and sixties and in retrospect, the artist himself knew of this fact. He confirms it to Feld in a letter in 1979 – a shy revelation that in all the ‘playing along’ perhaps it was only in later life that he realized it was more important to be understood than to be liked. It is at this time that we see that Guston painted the things he understood. He said of the images hung together in the gallery for his final retrospective that they showed a ‘life lived.’ To move away from the tentative abstraction of his early career to the intensely personal artifacts of his everyday habits and life gave his work the integrity and gravitas he so greatly desired.
By painting easily recognizable images, Guston allows for an evolution of the sublime away from the art of the Abstract Expressionists. It would be unfair at this point to discard the image – to denounce it as the sublime of the iconoclast and misplaced devotee. The idea of the image having no use or power in our visual advancement falls aside when we once more return to Barthes’ theory on the ‘imagination of the sign.’ The relationship between sign and signifier, as we have said, imply ‘the existence for each sign, of a reservoir or organized “memory” of forms from which it is distinguished by the smallest difference necessary and sufficient to effect a change of meaning.[14]’ In terms of the evolution of the sublime, after the success of Abstract Expressionism, with its all embracing voids and verticality, there is nowhere for it to go. Robert Rosenblum writes in 1961 that, including the three other ‘masters’ of the sublime (Rothko, Still, Pollock), Newman ‘produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval moment of creation. Indeed, a quartet of the large canvases…might well be interpreted as a post-World-War II myth of Genesis.[15]’ He goes on:
‘During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone. What used to be pantheism has now become a kind of “paint-theism.”[16]’
It is hard to imagine however, where the sublime, in terms of painting at least, will go – should we just keep making the canvases bigger?
Jean-Francois Lyotard has said that realism is the ‘mainstream art of any culture’ – something that upon viewing we can instantly recognize and understand. Malpas explains Lyotard’s theory saying that realism “‘makes” the world appear real…reality is not something we know naturally but rather that a sense of reality is generated through the beliefs and ideals of particular culture, and that realist art or literature is one of the things that helps a culture create a sense of its reality.[17]’ If it is that we use signs and signifiers to draw upon a reservoir of meaning/understanding to make a judgment, and if it is that judgments such as these form the basis of our cultural reality then Lyotard places the action of the sublime back into the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. The capacity for the evolution of the sublime lies here with Nicholas Mirzoeff writing:
‘Because the sublime is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world – for example, peace, equality, or freedom – “the experience of the sublime feeling demands a sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture.” (Lyotard) Unlike the beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the creature of culture and is therefore central to visual culture.[18]’
Between 1970 and 1978 Guston kept a series of studio notes on which he sketched ideas for later works and wrote down ideas and stories – as much letters to himself as anything else. One of these notes entitled ‘Reminders’ was published in Sky Magazine in 1973. It reads:
The thickness of things.
The object painted on a store window. A shoe –
a book – to be seen instantly from a distance.
The worst thing in the world
Is to look at another painting.
Make your mind blank and try
To duplicate the object.
The images I’ve painted out.
One morning, disconsolate, I started to paint,
not watching myself.
A sense that I am painting in reverse.
I continue the mistake. In the end,
there is the image I have been wanting to see.
Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium
and permanent light green[19].
Ross Feld speaks of a type of camouflage Guston used in the 1950s to classify himself as an Abstract Expressionist. He says however, that he failed in its use speaking of the ‘permanent light green’ as an indicator of the truth within the painting. Guston was always an artist much more concerned with representation rather than abstraction. A talented draughtsman, he was in effect denying his talent in the painting of convex patterns and swirling chunks of vertical and horizontal shelves. Feld explains:
‘There remained stubborn hints and shreds of representation as well as personal psychology: a green hood shape here, tendrils that might have been legs, a form suggesting a recoiling head.[20]’
He was dubbed an Abstract Impressionist – the works had more in common with the translucent sky and light of the Impressionist painters with visible forms emerging and retreating, than he had with the Newman zips or Pollock drips. As he works through this period he becomes stronger and more forceful in his approach to the canvas. He decides it is not a feeling of freedom he has been searching for in the work but rather ‘a state of “un-freedom” where only certain things can happen, unaccountable the unknown and free must appear[21]. It is at this point that Guston creates an iconography of abstract forms – ones which begin to appear repeatedly in the work. Ashton dubs them a ‘readable vocabulary of his dialectic’ and says that by 1955 he had ‘evolved a distinctive manner of suggesting vital forms within the still-amorphous atmosphere.[22]’
The idea of an iconography of images then becomes associated with Guston’s later painting. The objects to hand, the foibles and bad habits of cigarette smoking – the clock, jars and brushes of the studio, the brick walls and piled-up shoes of the concentration camps become his new dialectic. Guston left his family in Los Angeles after the death of his brother from gangrene as the result of a car accident. The shock of his brother’s death combined with the unresolved issues of his father’s suicide led to his severing all contact with his family – he even changed his name from Goldstein to the less Jewish sounding Guston in an attempt to separate himself from his upbringing and impress his non-Jewish wife’s family. The trauma led to periods of black depression and alcoholism –self-loathing and lethargy and at other times periods of intense fevered activity. The impetus to create a catalogue of imagery may have been one founded by his career in abstraction but it now encouraged the artist to paint the motifs and symbols of his life and youth to come to terms with such. The chaos and terror of finding a dead parent becomes symbolized in the hanging lightbulbs of his boyhood closet retreat – a place in which he drew for hours on end in an attempt to deal with his grief and the place his father hung himself. The distended severed limbs – legs and feet, shoes and grasping mauling hands echo gangrenous desire – death and disease. All of these are overseen by an all-pervading, glaring bloodshot eye. Irritated by cigarette smoke – straining and unsleeping it tirelessly examines and watches, perhaps representing Guston’s exhausting desire to know and to ‘see’ things exactly as they were after the ambiguous disappointment of abstraction. In 1968 he says:
‘I started working with just common objects. Books, things on the table, my shoes on the floor. Just the most everyday objects. And it seemed to me that by just restricting myself to a single object a great deal opened up … I had a lot of stuff in that picture [Untitled, 1969], then I just covered it up with a brick wall. It felt good … And the other thing is I never saw a painting of a brick wall. That’s important too, that I wanted to paint what hadn’t been seen.[23]’
We get a sense that Guston is working through something with what now have become symbols of destruction. There is a sense of normalcy and an almost cartoon-like naivety to them in some instances – child-like paintings of the kitchen clock in rounded vibrating loops, roller-blinds and big doodled eyes peering over horizons. They are things of domesticity in but removed and made ‘other,’ abused and menaced in this perverse world. In Guston himself we see what Lyotard calls the ‘nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject … the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.[24]’ It is almost as if he has no choice but to continue producing these works until he reaches reconciliation. In the iconography of the abstract as Ashton writes, he had:
‘commenced the long peregrination to another place where symbol is all but eliminated, and where the act of painting is itself symbolical; but he had not yet succeeded in purging himself of the past, his own, and the past of painting.[25]’
However, we see it is in representing the detritus of life that Guston comes to terms with both his life and the role of painting in it. Describing one of these later works ‘The Street’ 1977,(Fig.4) with its ‘cluster of stamping knobbly legs in their boots opposed by the phalanx of arms, with their trash-can lids,[26]’ Robert Hughes writes that Guston appealed to a culture of commonality ‘whose preservation was one of the deeper focuses of his anxiety.[27]’ To sum it up we can return to the artist’s scribbled studio notes entitled simply ‘Images’ – a vitally important reminder of what not to forget in the process of creating great painting:
Afternoon.
Mended Rags.
Clock-face.
Sticks of wood behind
a brick wall. Graining.
Back Yards.
screen doors.
porches
old cars being dismantled
Venice, Calif[28].
In 1969 speaking on the idea of the image Guston uses a story about Barnett Newman to explain his thoughts on sublimity. He says:
‘And Barney is a very scrupulous guy, I think. He controls every bit. So, this blurb goes on about Barney Newman: “Mr. Barnett Newman paints the sublime.” He’s always been involved in the sublime. So Musa and I burst out in hilarity in the snow. And I wanted to telephone Knoedler’s and give them some other name. I’d say “Mr. Knoedler, I’m interested in getting a sublime painting of Mr. Newman.” “Well,” he says, “a ten-foot sublime is forty-five thousand.” So I say, “Have you got a ten thousand sublime?” Well, this is the world we live in. This is the way it is, see?[29]’
Guston places this anecdote ‘in the snow’ – at his home, with his wife. The normal everyday background of the scene juxtaposed with the large cosmopolitan New York gallery spouting sublime sentiment becomes comical – we understand the irony and Guston’s desire to poke fun. His figurative paintings were never discussed in terms of the sublime as they were in the days of the Abstract painting and certainly never twinned with notions of transcendence and revelation as Barnett Newman’s so often were. Newman is discussed almost solely in terms of the sublime because it could be said that this was the ultimate goal of his art – to create that transcendence of feeling and thought, to enlighten, to destroy and to make new. Newman, like Guston, testifies to a bombastic terrible sublime. The sublime should be no quiet utterance but a declaration of the self; recognition of all that man has to offer and the potential to become. To him, it should encompass our entire being. The title of Newman’s paintings tells us of an artist who is concerned with defining the self in terms of the here and now but also, in terms of the infinite. He attempts to express the holy, sacrificial side of man in terms of simple painted blocks and contrasting zips of colour. Lyotard writes ‘art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart[30]’ and Newman with his bold declarations - ‘Now,’ ‘Here,’ ‘Covenant,’ ‘Onement I,’ create a sense of the now within a moment – a world within a world. There is a shifting of occurrence beyond what is actually happening – a present within a present. The temporal shift in a static object – the unreal plasticity of the painted surface and flat plains, sometimes literally ‘Tundra’ of colour, visually offer no depth or vision through the work but rather an expression of the ‘here and now.’ It is as Žižek said:
‘We achieve the “determinate reflection” when we become aware that this delay is immanent, internal to the “Thing-in-itself:” the Thing-in-itself is found in its truth through the loss of its immediacy. In other words, what appears, to “external reflection,” as an Impediment is in fact a positive condition of our access to the Truth: the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not accessible to us in its immediate self-identity.[31]’
According to Newman, it was only by moving away from weighted imagery, by distorting and denying it entirely, that modern art could now seek to assert itself. This led to the creation of a ‘pure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships,[32]’forming the only possible basis for an investigation into the contemporary sublime. Newman’s art buys into a modern idea of ‘minimalist restraint’ and his intention is to ‘resassert…man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.[33]’
Perhaps, however, it would be easier to give to Newman more credibility were we not aware of the extreme calculation on the artist’s part when it came to exhibiting the works. Lyotard compares the painterly effects of Newman to that of Cezanne – the ‘rendering of perception at its birth.[34]’ However, we know that Newman designed his exhibitions of work with help from Tony Smith. This architect and sculpture is heralded as ‘a leader in the evolution of the austere, white-walled spaces that continue to prevail in the world’s museums and galleries.[35]’ The importance of the calculation becomes apparent when we look at the idea of artistic inception and the physical creation of Newman’s work. The appraisal of the paintings evokes a sense of ‘the happening’ and the sublime dread of the ‘not happening.’ This reaction is felt by the artist however at a much earlier stage – in the creation of the piece. The gallery space is crucial to the artist’s communication of devices and none more so than in the case of Barnett Newman. We know that the zips in Newman’s paintings are constructed by placing masking tape on the bare canvas and painting a solid ground over, to reveal a too-thin, severe contrast upon its removal. In some cases the tape is left on to construct its own ground – creating a different sense of depth. There is a sense that something is being uncovered and revealed to us in chinks and drips of information. We are being invited to share in some secret knowledge known only to the artist. The bold design of these paintings declare there is nothing, there is only this – happening, here and now. The energy and vivification of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are helped in no small part to photographs released depicting the ‘virile, hard-drinking macho man[36]’ hard at work creating them. Perhaps, the viewer could argue more readily for a Newman sublime had they been there at the artistic inception. Only Newman has seen the birth of the zip – the viewer is left with the afterglow of revelation. Gilbert-Rolfe comments that ‘Newman’s sublime, then, is one of limitless visualized within the terms of an activity which leaves no trace of what was there before it but returns to what began it.[37]’ This makes it sound as if major sacrifices were made by the artist but the reality is a calculated presentation of paintings with no notebook or diary entries, no sketchbooks or scraps of paper to add weight to their articulation – these were destroyed by Newman before exhibiting his first solo show at the age of forty-five. The consideration of how the work was to be viewed was his most important decision. It was a sublime geared towards the profundity of the gallery space and its inhabitants. We are reminded of Longinus and the notion of being ‘primed’ for sublimity and this is the Newmanic sublime - a calculated consideration of our cultural taste, directed at the ‘echoes of a noble mind.[38]’ Ann Tempkin writes that:
‘The choice of paintings was always his. None of his ensuing shows merely unveiled the latest work; they presented calculated clusters in which paintings cross-referenced informed one another in specific ways.[39]’
Upon viewing his painting ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimus,’ (‘Man, Heroic and Sublime’) (Fig.5) one critic wrote that if he had been informed that the painting’s name was ‘God’ he would have believed it. Peter Schjeldahl’s praise turns to ‘faint embarrassment’ however when he closely examines the sketchy content of Newman’s work. There is no denying his ambition and talent as an artist but the reality of Newman’s sublime is something else:
‘Newman made things difficult for himself by insisting on transcendent meaning. No wonder his body of work is so small. God created the world only once we’re told. Newman put himself in a position of repeatedly saying, “Let there be light,” and having it be so... But when a Newman is less than supremely powerful one feels a bit embarrassed for him.[40]’
Perhaps Newman’s intentions were honourable. Like Burke’s Enquiry, his art sought to authenticate the sublime experience away from the idea of a higher power or God. He believed in a reality that was self-evident. Like Derrida and Kant he saw sublime feeling occurring in the revelation of consciousness, away from a ‘religious or noumenal “other” of human conception.[41]’ His rhetoric and content are almost entirely the opposite of Guston’s ‘common objects’ and he felt his purpose was to ‘prevent the sublime succumbing to the domesticating effects of time and sensibility.[42]’ The works offer booming declarations of genesis, creation and the hereafter. In 1948 he says:
‘We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.[43]’
Newman strives for a theoretically qualified sublime – the more abstract and distorted the better. In his essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ he says that ‘the European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity.[44]’ He sees American art as being free from this moral struggle. The shiny new bravado of post WWII Americana allows its art to move away from such conflict. Free from the bond of European classicism, art and indeed the artist have a new role. We see the artist as anarchist and the idea of a heroic, purposeful sublime comes to the fore. Max Kozloff writes:
‘To be sure, the question for sublimity invariably emerged as a call against institutional authoritarianism and was always considered to be a meaningful gesture of defiance against repression.[45]’
The geographical shift of ‘great art,’ now governed by a new set of rules meant that the sublime now becomes purposeful – it is not just the sublime as it is, but to achieve an end.
David Craven also speaks of the artist being engagé through their work as well as with it. He makes a critical point, however, about the value claims of these artists and the ideals behind this ‘new world’ art, warning of the danger of being overly caught up in their bravado. However much they may deny their European culture and its imagery, he says that its roots lie firmly in nineteenth-century European painting:
‘It was hardly plausible, for example, when Newman contended that many of the Abstract Expressionists had transcended all conventional artistic rhetoric as well as traditional visual imagery to arrive at “spontaneous”, hence, “self-evident” and “natural” revelations of the sublime. Just as few if any viewers have experienced the sublime before these paintings without first knowing what the concept means historically, so Newman, Rothko, Motherwell, Still and Gottlieb all drew substantially if also very subtly on the formal values associated with nineteenth-century European paintings that dealt with the sublime.[46]’
This is a tricky statement to consider as we have previously seen the sublimity of Newman’s painting avowed in the immediacy of perception and the realisation that we are being called upon to ‘respond without knowing in advance …[how] to respond.[47]’ Craven says that in fact, yes – we do and should know how to respond. The myth that we cannot is being propagated by artists who themselves could not respond or create a new order without first intrinsically understanding the rules from which they have to break free. Suspicion now lies in Newman’s credentials as midwife for a modern sublime – we know that he destroyed all of his early paintings and produced his first surviving work at the age of forty. Could it be that the earlier works highlight the truth of artistic practice – that there can be no revelatory moments without some initial planning and forethought, as well as many mistakes made along the road to the sublime. These rules of creation have at their heart the notions of Renaissance and European classical construct. Craven goes on to explain:
‘Since the visual language of the Abstract Expressionists was culturally mediated by earlier visual languages and the ideological values that emerged with them, the art of the sublime painters hardly originated in “natural” utterances outside history or society. Consequently, we cannot stop with Newman’s explanation of how this anti-capitalist, socially alienated and humanly affirmative art arose as the “spontaneous” outpouring of “autonomous individuals.”[48]’
It is for this reason that we must return to Philip Guston and his for the rights of figuration. One of Newman’s closest contemporaries, we see the two names constantly linked under the banner of American Abstract Expressionism or the ‘New York school.’ Their motive and their subject matter could not have been more different yet it is Newman who wins out the battle of the sublime – held up as a poster-boy of the new-world heroic art of the modern age. Robert Hughes contests this title writing:
‘there is nothing in the paintings to justify the depths attributed to them; but so fixed has the belief in Newman’s profundity become that in some quarters the merest doubt is taken almost for anti-Semitism...So, in the midst of an all-too-willing suspension of art-world disbelief a major reputation sprouted from a miniscule base... At one point Newman said with a straight face “I thought our quarrel here was with Michelangelo.” It was not a quarrel anyone could win with a stripe.[49]’
We can imagine Guston laughing in the snow, and later, surrounded by his broken shoes, crumpled up pieces of paper, cigarette butts and clocks, thinking of Newman orchestrating sublimity in the pristine and surgically white-cubed gallery room. The contaminants and detritus of the things that make up the everyday of our life become more of a proponent for the sublime than the quasi-religious sentiment of a Newman’s Abstract Expressionism. It is in these things that we recognise the self; our ideas of existence and being have more to do with the sublime anxieties of smoking and transcendence of deprecation than they do with the primed hallowed galleried zips and stripes of Newman’s calculated sublimity. To explain, Guston often quoted Kafka who said ‘the true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.[50]’
Speaking at the University of Minnesota in 1978 Guston describes the solid figurative imagery found in the majority of his later work. He says:
‘I knew I wanted to go on and deal with concrete objects. I got stuck on shoes, shoes on the floor. I must have done hundreds of paintings of shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, just everyday objects. And the more I did the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough; I don’t think one needs to depart from it in order to make art.[51]’
If any painting could be said to typify one of these later paintings it is ‘Painting, Smoking, Eating,’ (Fig.6) a work in oil measuring approximately seventy by one hundred inches. The protagonist of the piece (often said to be Guston himself), is a butter-bean shaped head, lying in bed, smoking. Its Cyclops eye stares, unblinking into space. A lit cigarette is poked into the space a mouth should occupy – like a chimney emitting fumes. There is a vulnerability to the curved pink prostrated bean-head jabbed through with this smoking funnel – letting acrid air out, as much as into, the face. It looks disconsolately into the distance. ‘Occupy,’ is perhaps the word best suited to describe the work – its subject is occupancy, the occupation of an enclosed room, filled with a tableaux of ordinary things. The things are made sinister by their lumped, heaped togetherness. They lose their purpose in the real world and are now rubbish and things of scrutiny rather than use, displayed as they are on the artist’s table – ready for examination or dissection. Of the smoker, Ashton writes:
‘Into this arrangement, so striking in its summary of all Guston’s idiosyncratic compositional habits, the unnerving head of the painter thrusts itself...The painter, then, is there to disrupt a world of esthetically arranged forms, is, in fact, the unwelcome prophet dedicated to disturbing the status quo.[52]’
A plate of American French-fries lies on a plate on the bed. They are sharp jutting shards of yellow fat against the soft curved head and blanket – cake-sliced representations of a New-America fast-food culture. They are grease filled chunks of bad nutrition designed to fill a hole rather than nourish the body. Time honoured anxieties reside here, of smoking and eating too much, procrastination in a bed of filth surrounded by the physical manifestations of a worrisome life – the light-bulb pull-cord come hangman’s rope and the mounds of shoes – a father’s disappointment. Guston described the process of representing this figure akin to creating a golem – a duplicate of the self that lives in a parallel or different world. He said ‘I like the feeling that I don’t have a painting in there, I’ve got a being in there[53]’ and explains the importance of creating, not only a painting concerned with the legitimacy of forms and objects but also with creating a space – the importance of occupancy:
‘But when you have something to deal with, a character or a person, well, then, he’s got to have an environment. He sleeps, he eats, he paints, he does things...And again I’m very interested in Max Beckmann...He’s made a place, and it’s very important to make a place.[54]’
Many of Guston’s paintings feature ubiquitous Ku Klux Klan hooded figures, infiltrating common scenes and familiar habitats. If before Guston sought to express the importance of occupancy and space, with these hoods he portrays the degeneration of place. Most often, the hooded characters are described as ‘cartoon-like’ – their inspiration drawn as much from Guston’s favourite ‘Mutt and Jeff’ and ‘Krazy Kat’ comic strips as from his abhorrence for the organised ritual violence and cruelty of the K.K.K. They feature throughout Guston’s figurative painting from the dramatic 1930s work ‘The Conspirators’ (Fig.7) to ‘The Studio,’ (Fig.8) painted in 1969. The cartoonish quality of the paintings stems not only from the characters in them but also in the brash colours of the scenes. They echo the lurid palette of early technicolour cartoons. In ‘The Studio,’ the oversized caricatured hand of the hooded figure holds a paintbrush which traces the outline of another hooded figure onto canvas – a hood painting a hood. The obligatory cigarette once more juts out from the space the mouth should occupy, smoke rising as if from a child’s drawing of a house and chimney. He holds a palette and is surrounded by the artist’s accoutrement of jars, brushes and paint-cans. Lit from above by the ever present hanging bare bulb, the hood itself is stitched together in large patchwork squares. There is an amateurish quality to the gown – it is homemade and unprofessional. The violence originated in the home and was stitched together in domesticity. It now returns to that space to ponder and paint. This stitching detail is reflected in the hood’s own portrait and we see a nightmarish cartoon-like quality to the slits that he peers through, contemplating his own image. Of these slits, echoing the bald simplistic eyes of the cartoon figure, Guston said:
‘And its amazing how this formula, the slits for eyes, became so expressive ... And the range of expressions you can get with those two slits is incredible. They can look tender, they can look angry, surprised. Its stylized like in a Noh play, the stylization has a range.[55]’
They humanise what we have ascribed to be a monster. The normalization of the hooded figure is what makes it more menacing than the figure himself. What we realise is that the hood is simply that – a hood covering a figure that resides, eats and sleeps within a home, the same as ourselves. Where Guston first desired to know what it would be like to be evil, to ‘plan and to plot,’ with these hooded figures he asks about the reality of evil and its place in the surrounding normal world. To plan and to plot but to return home to everyday things and carry on with the minutiae of everyday living – the smoking and eating; the decision making, the painting. Of this he explains:
‘There’s a whole series where I made artists out of them. Like, did they paint? If they do all these other things, why can’t they paint? Be artists? And, actually, what would they paint? They’d paint themselves. And I have some where they’re going to art exhibitions and they’re arguing about art and talking about art ... Well, it could be all of us. We’re all hoods.[56]’
Let us compare these works to Newman’s celebrated ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimus.’ Painted in 1950, it measures a colossal seven foot, eleven inches by seventeen foot, nine inches. It hangs horizontally inviting the eye to read it from left to right rather than vertically which one would perhaps expect from a painting declarative of sublimity and transcendence. It boldly testifies to the idea of ‘Man, Heroic and Sublime’ engulfing the viewer in heaving blocks of red, divided by five strips or ‘zips’ of various colours. Solidity and weight are juxtaposed with light and dark slashes of striped consideration which, traversing the painting from top to bottom, recede and push forward in the red glare. They dip in and out of our vision almost harmonising the painting like a series of musical notes on a hymn sheet. Looking upon it the main theme becomes one of confrontation. To be accosted by such an expanse of red is an unnatural sensation as it does not appear with such ferocity and expanse anywhere in the natural world. Charles Harrison explains this sensation writing:
‘In the natural order of things, bright red is usually seen as the colour of some tangible object. It is the very opposite of a “field colour” – a colour that denotes space ... The experience of looking into a field of red is thus somehow disturbing, particularly in a painting taller than a person. Red is – as it were – the conventional colour of “no entry.”[57]’
By not allowing the viewer to look through the painting and by denying any tangible recognisable imagery for the eye to latch onto, Newman calls for a different type of consideration with regards to the artwork. We must ask, when confronted with not even a void in the pictorial device, how can a sensate reaction such as the sublime occur? Lyotard feels that it is in our encounter with the impossible stating:
‘Thus, when he seeks sublimity in the here-and-now he breaks with the eloquence of Romantic art but he does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible. The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the “it happens” is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this it has to witness.[58]’
The figurative bouncing cartooned imagery of Philip Guston could not be more different to the omni-aspirational blasts of Newman’s Vir. Guston simply asks that we do what comes naturally to us – we look upon and recognise an image, draw from a bank of related signifiers and come to conclusions about that image; by then placing it apart from our denoted signifiers we draw new conclusions and inform ourselves as to the meaning of the painting. The progress of man’s cultural evolution is highlighted by this ability to reckon with the familiar and recognisable and to put it in another ‘place,’ – creating new sets of identifiers and so on. By painting something and by painting nothing, Newman asks for not only a different type of reaction to painting but that new criteria governing the rules of appraisal are drawn up. When a failure to comprehend is the conclusion we draw from these abstract works, he dresses it up as a sublime transcendence of thought for the new age. Lyotard defines his actions as such:
‘The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety, a term with strong connotations in modern philosophies of existence and of the unconscious. It gives to waiting…but suspense can also be accompanied by pleasure…the joy obtained by the intensification of being that the event brings with it. It is at the very least a sign, the question mark itself, the way in which it happens is withheld and is announced: Is it happening? The mark of the question is ‘now,’ now like the feeling that nothing might happen, the nothingness is now.[59]’
When we compare Guston’s ‘common objects’ to Newman’s ‘colouristic sensations’ we are reminded of the difference in their artistic intention as well as in their opposing styles. Guston was not concerned as to whether the sublime was ‘now’ or whether the idea of ‘the happening’ or ‘not happening’ could be appropriated and represented by painting. The world was happening and through depicting the very ordinary and sometimes brutal things of his surroundings, he managed to categorise his place in it. Through the action of painting, one could set oneself free and this came from appropriating the humble objects of the everyday and the domestic. Artworks such as ‘Vir Heroicus’ led to the categorisation of painting in terms of philosophy and theory rather than practice.
In 1969, Guston’s abandonment of abstraction led him to paint what he called ‘the brutality of the world.[60]’ He describes it as a rebirth of both his methodology and subject matter, renewing his passion for painting. He strove for authenticity in the immediacy of forms rather than the impulsive gesturing of the Abstract Expressionists and became obsessed with the notion of what things actually were and how they fit into the telling of a story. He announced ‘I want to see what it looks like,’ emphasising the desire to capture the reality of objects in a space to express what had only before been possible through the creation of his abstract art. This abrupt shift was seen by many as juvenile and even heretic with one reviewer going so far as to denounce Guston as going from ‘mandarin to stumblebum.[61]’ Arthur Danto explains:
‘The term “mandarin” was intended to diminish what had set Guston apart as an abstractionist. The paintings were too dainty, too light and airy by contrast with the heavy pigment of the true Expressionists to be considered authentic. The new paintings were then seen as an opportunistic bid for that missed authenticity. They were coarse, juvenile, and demotic.[62]’
Guston chose to ignore these sentiments, focusing on the cathartic and purifying ritual of creating recognisable imagery. For him, there was clarity in the grotesquery of hooded figures pawing through the common objects of household living. They begin to inhabit familiar rooms and buildings, long abandoned by routine or normalcy. The hoods, ‘flogging each other, bloody hands and books[63]’ take centre stage in Guston’s paintings. They infiltrate the banal habitats of the everyday and turn them into warped desecrated spaces. That Guston would chose such a subject matter following the success of his career in abstraction is notable in terms of art history. It was according to Guston however, a choice made through necessity. Dore Ashton writes:
‘During the Chicago riots, Guston worked furiously. He painted shoes like buildings, clocks, stony books, buildings like primitive pueblos. Headlike shapes mashed after rioting. Owlish heads and rapid, choreographed conversations between disembodied hands. Brick walls appeared, reminiscent of his old holocaust allusions to suffocating imprisonment, and with them the familiar hooded figures. He was off on an irreversible orgy of grotesquerie.[64]’
The colour-field paintings of Guston’s peers are often linked to the sublime, said to inspire transcendence and enlightenment. Newman had theorised that this lay in the idea of ‘the happening’ and the ‘not happening.’ The suspense of looking, but of then seeing the unrecognisable, yet also familiar blocks of colour, leads to strong reactions – heart-sinking thrills of non-recognition. The disappointment and suspense of the encounter leads to a type of sudden unexpected realisation – an epiphany of thought and feeling. This sensation can categorise the work as sublime, but in terms of the paralogical assault rather than in the appraisal of well rendered recognisable imagery. Our ability to engage with the concept of an artwork created solely of and for itself promotes a new way of seeing and opens new avenues for thought and appreciation. If it is that we have evolved from wondering at the smooth polished perfection of Classical Greek sculpture and European Renaissance art to an engagement with the non-figurative heroic pictorial assaults of the American Abstract Expressionists, how does an artist like Guston hope to create the sublime from horrifying tangible painted forms in order to further this evolution?
We can consider Edmund Burke’s theory of terror and the sublime. The notion of threat and its capacity to influence the mind is explored in his treatise ‘On the Sublime’ with Burke suggesting that it is a necessary component of producing sublime feeling:
‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.[65]’
While it has been generally understood there is a sense of ‘letting go’ or losing control in the sublime experience, here Burke implies that control is taken away. Previous theories of the sublime indicate that the sublime is inspired by luxuriousness (Addison) or ‘exalted sentiment’ (Longinus) whereas Burke explains that ‘when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible.[66]’ However, if we can distance the site of pain outside the sphere of our physical existence its influence changes:
‘At certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be (pleasurable), and they are delightful, as we everyday experience.[67]’
Paul Crowther has termed this equation Burke’s ‘safety clause.[68]’ He queries humanity’s willing exposure to pain or shock in terms of Burke’s theory and says it is at this point that we see the sublime becoming a ‘culturally prevalent tendency.[69]’ He claims that due to the monotony of existence it is part of human nature to wish to experience the intense effect of the sublime and the distancing of this pain allows us to do so. It is down to our recognition of the act that we subsequently develop a greater form of consciousness. As Luke Gibbons writes:
‘what was unusual, and indeed unsettling, about the shift in cultural sensibility effected by the Enquiry was its identification of ‘terror’ and the figure of the body in pain as the basis of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience.[70]’
By painting masked figures Guston removes accountability for their actions. In their garish horror world they are free to wander and desecrate as they please, riding around ‘in their black cars through deserted squares, hauling grainy hefts of wood for their eventual crosses. [71]’ Hidden from view, they are blameless in their activity, blindly exploring, tearing down and even then assimilating into their environment. We become witness to a kind of cartoon genocide, with the familiarity of the recurring motifs and arrangements making them even more terrifying and repulsive. Guston shepherds their movements, becoming both watcher and director in the grotesque mummery. He felt he was ‘like Babel with his Cossacks, I feel as if I have been living with the Klan, riding around empty streets, sitting in their rooms smoking, looking at light bulbs.[72]’ (Fig.9)
According to Burke, we understand that terror and astonishment when confronted with the sublime object form sublime feeling. We inherently invest in the object its sense of terror/sublimity which in turn informs the mind of its astonishment. He says that ‘whatever therefore is terrible, with regards to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of dimensions or not.[73]’ As Crowther says:
‘What Burke is in fact doing, then…is not simply redescribing the phenomenology of the sublime passion, but … showing that it arises from two different ways of being affected by the objects – namely through their direct overwhelming impact on the senses, or through the mediation of ideas of pain and danger.[74]’
Peter de Bolla also examines the notion of our internalization of the external object in his ‘Discourse of the Sublime’ saying that ‘all internal states can be translated back into external effects in order to be retranslated into internal sensation.[75]’
Guston frequently refers to himself as the director of the images rather than the painter or creator of such. Like a movie reel, chopped up and exhibited in pieces, the figurative 1970s paintings show us a vernacular series of household scenes, appropriated and returned back to the viewer with an ugly, menacing polish. If there is humor in the work it belongs to the persecutors, idly fingering possessions and turning them into something else – tainted, defiled and contaminated by their presence. We now internalize the commonality of the scene and its objects, translating them into adulterated and polluted remnants of a life once lived. The fear of stigmatization stirs something deep within and we ask, where is the pure naivety of the abstract sublime transcendence? Danto also recognizes:
‘It is one thing to aspire to the sublime. It is another to bring into art the preoccupations of a man with ordinary appetites, who worries about love and eating too much, and how to give up smoking, and not just about being evil, but being bad.[76]’
We must also be suspicious of Guston’s intentions throughout. There is a calculated attempt on his part to portray the thrill of debauchery. Were it that the figures seemed exclusively cruel we would accept his pleas as merely the reproducer of such activity. However, the humor and child-like consideration of the hooded figures in the canvases often infer the humane side of the horror. One cannot forget Guston’s desire to understand ‘what would it be like to be evil? To plan and to plot?’ At one point he writes: ‘Now, this week, in reverse, I made a huge and TOWERING vast rock – with platforms – ledges, for my forms to be on – and to play out their private drama. A Theater – maybe? A STAGE?[77]’ This oft-referred to notion of ‘plotting’ the scenes suggests that Guston himself is the one in power – manipulating not only the figures in the paintings to his bidding, but also the viewer’s responses and internalization.
Burke’s Enquiry frequently deals with the notion of power. He says that ‘besides those things which directly suggest the idea of danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.[78]’ Because the enjoyment of pleasure requires no ‘great effort’ on our part, Burke theorizes that pain and threat (death) are more readily associated with power. We can never be ‘free from terror[79]’ in the presence of such and it is this ‘power’ that is the driving force of our submission. The superior effects of ‘strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together.[80]’ Again, our will or choice plays no role in these effects. Burke examines the potency of power’s effect upon the mind concluding that terror is its constant companion. One cannot exist without the force of the other. The reader is left in no doubt as to the terrible and forceful nature of the sublime. The sublime object is defined as such by the viewer due to the horror we encounter upon its appraisal. The complexity of such an equation lies not with the object itself however, but in our own capacity to then realize the terror of the infinite. De Bolla sees the act as enabling:
‘The process of analysis to produce further and further sublime objects, greater and greater astonishment, more and more terrifying power. It is not the sublime as such which presents the danger of infinite excess, but the discourse which examines, describes and analyses its causes and effects.[81]’
There is a goading quality to Guston’s scenes – paintings such as ‘A Day’s Work,’ 1970 (Fig.10) and ‘Flatlands,’1970 (Fig.11) are the work of an enabler. He deliberately wishes to construct images of anxiety and sorrow, discomforting the viewer. He repeatedly uses the same forms in his paintings to further our analyses of horror – seeing the same characters in different positions places them at different points in our comprehension – the kitchen, the workshop, the town hall. By inhabiting the different spaces, they occupy different roles in our witness of the infestation/occupation – the domestic hub of the house, the workplace, the town square. The threat of violence and persecution, the removal of dignities – the carnality of the ugly, mashed-together gangs of hoods and heads, articulate the Burkean sublime – that of terror and fear. Its proponent was fully cognizant of his involvement writing ‘Somehow, I think I’ve always felt that creating was an evil thing – Satan’s work – Maybe therein lies the shame.[82]’ His willingness to engage with such subject matter was however, forgiven by many friends and critics who saw it as part of Guston’s ferocious desire to ‘see’ exactly what was there in the world before him. Ashton writes:
‘Since matter and form assumed a life of their own as soon as they were deployed on his canvas, Guston’s suspicion that he could create a parallel universe had a certain justness...The cultivation of anxiety as a method of artistic discourse was practiced by many in various arts.[83]’
On the uncomfortable subject matter, Guston himself surmised that the negativity and ruthlessness of the painting also showed the viewer something beyond the scenes themselves, writing ‘what we see is the wonder of what it is that is being seen. Perhaps it is the anxiety of painting itself.[84]’
Returning to Burke’s theory he says that sublime feelings occur in the self when we are in a state of threat or endangerment. It moves sublimity away from the confines of the natural world and picturesque imagery, and into a position concerned with the experience of the viewer. Since it is the grotesque and disorientating effect of Guston’s paintings that are the most evocative we can now quantify our reaction in terms of the sublime. Separating the notion of beauty and the sublime are key to our identification of this point. Burke does this in order to invest in the sublime a type of integrity. The fervor of our passion is not felt due to a weakness or vulnerability of the mind but is bound to our sense of self-actualization. Crowther says:
‘by showing that the sublime is intrinsically connected with them, Burke is able to invest the sublime passion with an intensity and, as it were, existential magnitude that more than compensates for its lack of positivity.[85]’
The separation of the sublime and the beautiful is not an example of sublimity’s ‘axiological inferiority[86]’ – that is to say, an inferior philosophical value judgment of the sublime, but rather a critical conclusion drawn from our behavior that is identified by Burke before we can begin to understand the qualities that evoke these feelings. In 1978 Guston describes the action of looking at his work almost exclusively in terms of the experience of seeing and, in doing so, even proposes a new theory of what art actually is:
‘I started to shake when I painted this picture. God there is no picture plane! It is just real, that’s all there is – just real – no plane at all – What nonsense – the idea of a plane – No – all there finally is left is just the moment – the second – of life’s gesture – fixed forever – in an image – there – to be seen…There is no order especially – if there is an order to it at all, I don’t know it – don’t comprehend it – it is like nothing I’ve done before – not one area in this mound stops to let you look at it. Ah, so that’s what “art” is – lets you stop – isolate it – lets us “see” it – but here in this new picture there is “nothing” to see – except multitudes of masses, that go on forever – in the mind. You could mingle with this crowd, move into it – submerge yourself in it – be part of it. You would hear voices, murmurs, weeping.[87]’
According to Burke’s theory, Guston’s work at this time contains all the elements necessary to evoke the sublime experience – terror, passion, disorder and fear. Most of all, it robs the viewer of the standard expectations of looking at a painting and reduces it to a chaotic and vulnerable state of not knowing. It is in this condition that the sublime becomes a psychological enquiry and, in doing so, allows for new criteria essential to create the experience in the future. It has become something else. As John Baillie said:
‘The Sublime dilates and elevates the Soul, Fear sinks and contracts it; yet both are felt upon viewing what is great and awful.[88]’
In his investigation Burke also considers sublimity in terms of our historical situation as well as in the aesthetic and philosophical sphere of Enlightenment thought. The enquiry is not only a study of aesthetic theory but reads as a ‘critique of universal reason[89]’ in the industrial age. We are encouraged to advocate‘aesthetics of intervention’ and to consider the ‘triumph of sympathy.[90]’ In what Luke Gibbons calls a ‘crucial departure from dominant Enlightenment thinking,[91]’ Burke’s theory of the sublime can be seen as ‘an attempt to prevent the aesthetic from becoming, in effect, an anesthetic.[92]’ It is a consideration of not only our passions, tastes and beauty but the basis of an ethical rationale. A cornerstone of Burke’s theory of the sublime and the beautiful is the notion of terror. Astonishment, says Burke, is the sublime affecting the mind in its ‘highest degree.[93]’ This inspires in us a great passion but Burke proposes that we see its origins in all pervading fear. At the point where our minds are ‘robbed’ of comprehension and reason we see ‘its motions are suspended with some degree of horror’ and that ‘whatever is terrible, with regards to sight, is sublime too.[94]’ It is only what is ‘analogous to terror[95]’ that produces the strongest human emotion and it is this that Burke considers the ultimate source of the sublime. Pain, therefore, is the ‘king of the terrors.[96]’ Burke’s concept of love is married to ‘violent effects’ and madness; passion is linked to horror and it is darkness rather that light which is more productive of the sublime. In light of this, Crowther evaluates his theory of the ‘sympathetic sublime’ explaining its necessity:
‘If an individual did not have this capacity for aesthetic experience, but responded to the negation of life only with fear or aversion, then we might describe that individual as... lacking a form of existential courage.[97]’
Burke’s alternative vision for social empathy encourages us to look to a ‘sympathetic sublime’ propounding the importance of ‘fellow-feeling’ playing a major role in further Enlightenment thoughts and objectives. We can consider the role of empathy when looking upon Guston’s figurative painting. Like Burke, he worried about the idea of the aesthetic becoming anaesthetic, abandoning abstract expressionism for the constructed Klan hoods and imagery of later works. He describes the necessity of doing so at the New York Studio School in 1969 saying:
‘I was thinking on the way downtown, how the origin of art in the beginning, the origin of expression, was image making. Every time I see an abstract painting now I smell mink coats, you know what I mean? It’s really terrible. Terrible brainwashing…it’s a terrible thing. Image making is the most fascinating…it’s the only thing. The rest is just a lot of shit, making colours and selling yourself a bill of goods.[98]’
To understand the connection between empathy and Guston we once more must consider the idea of the grotesque – the bizarre and unnatural shapes, mish-mash of forms and characters in his work. The word refers to a fifteenth century derivative of the word ‘grotto,’ coming from the decorative elements found in Italian excavated cave dwellings. We see the grotesque in art previously employed by Francisco de Goya. His macabre prints of witches pulling dead men’s teeth, hacked up limbs and asylums and his black paintings depicting such torments as the cannibalization of flesh, speak both of another world and our own. Created at a time of civil unrest and violence in his eighteenth century Spain, Goya’s grotesquery is ever more starkly illustrated when contrasted against his catalogue of tame and, at times, even lovable caricature/portraiture of the royal court. The work had a profound effect on Guston who saw in the artist a contemporary – somebody who saw the terror of the world and re-invented depiction to create a separate world, one that strongly confirmed the realities of our own. Like Goya, he empathized with the cruelty of life and sought to express it to cathartic effect. He wrote:
‘Our whole lives (since I can remember) are made up of the most extreme cruelties of holocausts. We are the witnesses of hell. When I think of the victims it is unbearable. To paint, to write, to teach in the most dedicated sincere way is the most intimate affirmation of creative life we possess in these despairing years.[99]’
Baudelaire wrote of Goya that his merit lay in ‘having created a credible form of the monstrous.’ He goes on: ‘all those distortions, those bestial faces, those diabolic grimaces of his are impregnated with humanity.[100]’ Guston too works into his figures and scenes a type of monstrous humanity – a transmogrification of human forms and common objects to subversive, warped yet recognizable scenes. We often associate the sublime with a transcendence of thought and notions of epiphany, with artworks revealing to us concepts that put our consciousness on a higher plane. In this omniscient setting we imagine we will learn the secrets of the universe – enlightenment and revelation. The work of Philip Guston does something rather different. By showing us things ‘as they are’ – by being concerned with the act of truly seeing and conveying this to us in the form of the grotesque, we, the viewer, are made to recognize our capacity for fear, degeneration, cruelty and mockery. By depicting objects found in the kitchen sink of life, he gives us something familiar to engage with, rather than the ambiguousness of Abstract Expressionism. We empathize with our own pathetic reality and deterioration – we see sublimity in our realization of what Burke called the ‘triumph of sympathy.’ He writes:
‘As our creator has designed us, we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportional delight; and there most, where our sympathy is most wanted, in the distresses of others.[101]’
Philip Guston was an artist of integrity and mindfulness. He greatly felt the responsibility of his role, even to the point of defining art in a series of Laws, almost as a mantra to himself so that he would not forget:
‘The Laws of Art are generous laws. They are not definable because they are not fixed. These Laws are revealed to the Artist during creation and cannot be given to him. They are not knowable. A work cannot begin with these Laws as in a diagram. They can only be sensed as the work unfolds. When the forms and space move toward their destined positions, the artist is then permitted to become a victim of these Laws, the prepared and innocent accomplice for the completion of the work. His mind and spirit, his eyes, have matured and changed to a degree where knowing and not knowing become a single act.
It is as it these Governing Laws of Art manifest themselves through him.[102]’
By adopting the role of a conduit and by proposing a philosophy of art that was removed from the calculated urbanity of the New York School and galleries, Guston places the idea of sublimity back in the hands of the artist. He portrayed the brutality of the world in a series of common objects – clocks, cigarettes and hands with hooded figures echoing the Burkean sublime of terror and violence. It has been established that notions of violence and pain are analogous to terror - we are reminded of Burke who says that they have a superior effect on the mind and so become testifiers to the modern sublime; the sublime of the everyday and the abhorrent. Guston likened himself to a director of images. Like Goya, who painted the macabre and grotesque in scenes of civil war and monstrous dreams, Guston puts together a series of evil Klan hoods defiling the familiar domestic spaces of our everyday living. Through portraying images of evil and discarding the lofty sentiment of the high sublime, he propounds Edmund Burke’s triumph of sympathy. That we recognise degeneration and suffering shows a type of social empathy – the sublime of terror morphs into a sublime of ‘fellow feeling.’ We can now chart our cultural evolution in terms of compassionate thought – the epiphany of the sublime mirrors this epiphany of sympathy.
Throughout his career, Guston sought a feeling of ‘freedom’ and ‘unfreedom.’ He constantly changed and developed his work and its content, often away from the popular modes of practice adopted by his peers. He shunned both abstraction and pop art to remain true to his own painting, making a ‘moral choice’ to retain his own integrity and in order to progress. He decided that the loss of faith in the idea of the image was a loss from which we would greatly suffer – artistically and culturally it was a ‘step back’ in our development and crucially, he felt that this denoted the abstract as a lie or ‘cover up,’ going so far as to link it to the downfall of all American culture. In his painting, we see an alternative vision for sublimity, away from the galleried transcendence of Newman or Rothko. In him, we see a reaffirmation of the artistic responsibility for sublime evolution – a sensitivity to ideas is required, one that is acquired through cultural accumulation. The sublime now becomes a ‘creature of culture[103]’ – it no longer resides solely in the natural or religious world and we no longer need the towering mountain or religious deity to authenticate its existence. Shaw writes that ‘In the discourse of the sublime, we thus become aware that all points of origin such as God, nature, or mind are merely effects of the combinatory power of language.[104]’ In Guston’s adoption of a discourse that is familiar and recognisable he places the sublime squarely in the figurative:
‘The only thing I have is my radicalism against art. All that abstract shit – museums and art history aesthetics. What a lie – lie! The only true impulse is realism, Arty art screws you in the end; always be on guard against it![105]’
He created an iconography of images, unique to himself. The cataloguing of motifs founded in the pain and suffering of his youth allowed Guston to deal with the grief of his father’s suicide and brother’s death. They are instantly recognisable as ‘Guston’ – hanging bulbs and staring Cyclopean eyes denoted not only the detritus of a ‘life lived’ but also allowed for a cathartic rebirth of imagery in his painting:
‘Shoes. Rusted iron. Mended rags. Seams. Dried bloodstains. Pink paint. Bricks. Bent nails and pieces of wood. Brick walls. Cigarette butts. Smoking. Empty booze bottles. How would bricks look flying in the air – fixed in their gravity – falling? A brick fight. Pictures hanging on nails in walls. The hands of clocks. Green window shades. Two – or three-story brick buildings. Endless black windows. Empty streets.[106]’
It was as if he had to create a bank of images familiar and unique to himself in order for him to see the world in the way that others must see it. Having invested so heavily in the idea of the abstract, it only became possible for the artist to develop, to move forward and to ‘see,’ by painting these brick walls and cigarette butts. In abandoning the abstract, it is as if he were made blind and had to learn to feel an object in order to know what it was. Without this rebirth, Guston’s art would have lingered and been made stale by a movement and style in which he no longer believed sustainable to the development of painting. He reminds us: ‘If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean these is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place. I paint what I want to see.[107]’
By comparing Guston to Newman we see that the reality of living and working as an artist on the periphery of a New York School or gallery driven art scene allowed for an organic development of the sublime. It is one that occurs naturally in life, in the ‘figuring out’ and small epiphanies/wonders of the intensely personal and everyday routine. When we contrast this with the theoretically qualified abstract sublime of Guston’s peers, which lies in the rigid formulised gallery art of the New York school what we have is a real quantifiable lifelong investigation versus a philosophical calculation. It is not enough to simply announce oneself as sublime or ones work as transcendent – hearkening genesis and creation. Instead, we must return to Guston, in the studio, writing reminders on scraps of paper; the screwing up and casting aside of abstract ideas, the return to and wonderment at the everyday. He writes to himself near the end of his life in 1978:
‘No good to paint in the head – what happens is what happens when you put the paint down – you can only hope that you are alert – ready – to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing – a being. Believe in this miracle – it is your only hope. To will this transformation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don’t matter. They collapse anyway in front of the painting.[108]’
[1] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations, University of California Press, 2011, p.31
[2] Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.138
[3] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.193
[4] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, University of California Press, 1990, p.90-91
[5] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston,p.96
[6] Ibid. p.97
[7] Op.Cit
[8] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.47
[9] Barthes, Roland, The Rhetoric of the Image, The Photography Reader, Ed. Wells, Liz, 2003, p. 120-124
[10] Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1991, p.397
[11] LeVitte Harten, Doreet, ‘Creating Heaven,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morley, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, p.73
[12] Op.Cit.
[13] Mayer, Musa, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, Knofp, 1998, p.170
[14] Barthes, Roland, ‘The Imagination of the Sign,’ Barthes: Selected Writings, Ed. Sontag, Susan, p.221
[15] Rosenblum, Robert, ‘The Abstract Sublime,’1961, The Sublime, Ed. Morley, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, p.111
[16] Ibid.p.113
[17] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003, p.44
[18] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge 1998, p.9
[19] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.315
[20] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston, Counterpoint, 2003, p.85
[21] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, p. 106
[22] Op.Cit
[23] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversation, p.221-223
[24] Lyotard, Jean-Francois, ‘What is Postmodernism?’ Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, Ed. Lodge, David, Wood, Nigel, Pearson Education Limited, Third Edition, 2008, p.419
[25] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, p.83
[26] Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New, p.398
[27] Op.Cit
[28] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.315
[29] Ibid.p.109
[30] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Contemporary Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2009, p.33
[31] Kay, Sarah, Žižek, A Critical Introduction, Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.35
[32] Newman, Barnett, ‘The Sublime is Now,’ The Contemporary Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2009, p.26
[33] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006, p.121
[34] Morely, Simon, The Contemporary Sublime, p.37
[35] Schjeldahl, Peter, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, Thames and Hudson, 2008, p.117
[36] Chilvers, Ian, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004
[37] Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.139
[38] Longinus, On the Sublime, p.6
[39] Tempkin, Ann, Barnett Newman, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2002, p.21
[40] Schjeldahl, Peter, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, p.118
[41] [41] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.119
[42] [42] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.122
[43] Harrison, Charles, ‘Abstract art: Reading Barnett Newman’s Eve,’ Frameworks for Modern Art, Ed. Gaiger, Jason, Yale University Press, 2003, p.130
[44] Morely, Simon, The Contemporary Sublime, p.26
[45] Frascina, Frascina, Pollock and After, The Critical Debate: Second Edition, Routledge, 2000, p.35
[46] Frascina, Frascina, Pollock and After…p.255
[47] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.123
[48] Frascina, Frascina, Pollock and After…p.225
[49] Hughes, Robert, American Visions, The Epic History of Art in America, Knopf, 2009, p.493-493
[50] Kafka, Franz, Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way, in ‘Dearest father: Stories and Other Writings,’ New York: Schocken Books, 1954
[51] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.281
[52] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston,p.178
[53] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.226
[54] Op.Cit
[55] Ibid. p.159
[56] Ibid. p. 224-225
[57] Harrison, Charles, ‘Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman’s Eve,’ Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Gaiger, Jason, Yale University Press, 2003, p.134
[58] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Unpresentable: The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Contemporary Sublime, ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2009, p.30
[59] Op.Cit
[60] Storr, Robert, ‘View from the Bridge,’ Frieze, Issue 87, Nov – Dec, 2004
[61] Danto, Arthur C., Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life, Columbia University Press, 2005, p.134
[62] Ibid. p.135
[63] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, p.159
[64] Ibid. p.156
[65] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.36
[66] Op.Cit
[67] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.37
[68] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.123
[69] Ibid p.128
[70] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland, University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.20
[71] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston,p.162
[72] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p164
[73] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.36
[74] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.119
[75] DeBolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime, Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, Blackwell, 1989
[76] Danto, Arthur C., Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life,p.134
[77] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston, p.50
[78] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.59
[79] Op.Cit
[80] Ibid. p.60
[81] Ibid.
[82] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston,p.3
[83] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p121-123
[84] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p123
[85] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.117
[86] Op.Cit
[87] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston,p8
[88] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge,2006, p.54
[89] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland: aesthetics, politics, and the colonial sublime, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.166
[90] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland,p.110
[91] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland, p.4
[92] Op. Cit
[93] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.53
[94] Op. Cit
[95] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1990, p.36
[96] Op. Cit
[97] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.130
[98] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations, University of California Press, 2010, p.109
[99] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p177
[100] Barasch, Moshe, Theories of Art. 2. From Wincklemann to Baudelaire, Routledge, 2000, p381
[101] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.42
[102] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.310
[103] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge 1998, p.9
[104] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.11
[105] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.311
[106] Ibid. p.308
[107] Ibid. p.311
[108] Ibid. p.314
‘There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth that we inherit from abstract art: That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is “impure.” It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting’s continuity. We are image makers and image-ridden. There are no “wiggly lines or straight lines” or any other elements. You work until they vanish. The picture isn’t finished if they are seen.[1]’
Guston’s dramatic move away from abstraction came after a very successful career in it. In doing so, he asks questions about the authenticity of the sublime experience in relation to non-figurative art. He asks us to consider notions of ‘truth’ in an artwork and says that if we are to gaze upon paintings which contain predominantly unrecognisable forms then a genuine transcendence of thought cannot take place. We see him building up a bank of recognisable domestic images, returning to them repeatedly in his later career and we ask, how can the depiction of primarily household objects challenge something as widely acclaimed as Barnett Newman’s ‘theoretically qualified’ notion of the sublime? Gilbert-Rolfe writes for example that:
‘Others have seen the New York painters of the 1950s, Newman among them, as an American version of the German romantic sublime, an art concerned with the overwhelming and with the idea of density as an idea of acting out, a sublime severe but atmospheric and engulfing rather than hard and resistant.[2]’
We must ask, how can Guston provoke sublime reaction by painting shoes and clocks compared with the all-consuming impact of his contemporaries’ paintings, and indeed, his own among them?
By adopting a position away from the metropolitan gallery driven art scene, Guston placed himself at the periphery of the art world. It is widely considered that the evolution of the sublime lay in the phenomena of artists such as Rothko, Pollock and Newman. The struggle to ‘break through’ the ambiguousness of abstract art with a return to figuration was seen by many as a step back in this evolution but this struggle mimics the idea of breaking through to achieve transcendence. The status of the image is one that we now take for granted but, during the era of the powerhouse all-American macho intelligentsia, it became a thing of artistic ridicule. Pop art could only raise its status once more by adopting it as kitsch – rashes of in-jokes via plastic repetitions and concepts. Guston fell between the two camps – the intellectual abstract loftiness of the high sublime and the ironic image fuelled cynicism of Pop art. He decides instead to cling to the familiar and everyday and, in doing so, raised more questions about the idea of the sublime than we had thought possible:
‘So that I felt that maybe there’s an ambiguity that I haven’t even dreamt of. In other words, what would happen if I did paint a simple object like a book or a hand or a shoe? That finally became to me the most enigmatic of all. It seemed to me like an even greater enigma. Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity. It’s a different kind of ambiguity I wanted. I was weary of that whole thing that had gotten so accepted, which made it repulsive to me and thrown back to my face again and all that. An ambiguity that became so different and generalized that there was nothing left of it anymore.[3]’
Ashton writes of Philip Guston’s desire to feel what he called a feeling of ‘freedom’ in his early career:
‘The experience he longed for – recorded so often by Pasternek’s “world’s best creators” – was to feel a reality in the work more vital than any known emotion, and more seductive.[4]’
At a time when Guston was painting ‘close-up’ visions of whispering abstract delicacy and primitive ink drawings, his cultural sphere was made up of people who created works full of imagery and people from the everyday world – drawn entirely from real life. From an early age he admired the work of V.I. Pudovkin whose processes echo that of the artist in his later career. He spoke of building a film, rather than shooting it and said that the ‘structuring’ of an event to capture its happening on screen was central to the art of film making: ‘Pudovkin recognised that an artist, using materials drawn from life (objects and people), was nonetheless functioning as a creator, that the composition of forms was central to his art.[5]’ Guston’s primitive ink scratching and whisperings were a far cry from the instantly recognisable, heavy ‘common objects’ of his later work but in creating them he began to ask questions regarding picture plane, dimensionality and the figurative image. (Fig.2) He called the process employed at this time ‘dissolving form’ but in doing so, wished to ‘locate the traces of form in space.[6]’ (Fig.3) Ashton writes:
‘In Piero he had understood that composition was based on extreme attention to the location of forms in space. In painting nothing is more difficult than that. What he sought to do in this long series of drawings, in which forms are released from specific context and yet are made to subsist in a small universe created by the artist all at once on the pages, was to “locate” an image.[7]’
For almost three years Guston limits his palette to black and white – forcing boundary and structure in order to find continuity and recognition in the work. He speaks of wishing to find release – a double-experience whereby one has created a new image and yet innately recognizes something of the self in that image. This quest for self-recognition in form shapes the basis for Guston’s desire to experience the above-mentioned feeling of ‘freedom’ – an intense feeling of understanding and epiphany in one’s own painting. In 1965 he expands on the process to Harold Rosenberg, saying:
‘In the last years there’s been, obviously, no colour. Simply black and white or gray and white, gray and black. I did this very deliberately, and I’ll tell you why. Painting became more crucial to me. By crucial I mean that the only measure now was precisely to see whether it was really possible to achieve – to make this voyage, this adventure, and to arrive at this release that we have been talking about without any seductive aids like colour, for example. Now I’ve become involved in images and the location of those images, usually a single form, or a few forms. It becomes more important to me simply to locate the form.[8]’
This deliberate and protracted process leads to what some critics call a ‘moral choice’ for the artist. He rejects abstraction and begins to narrow down shapes and lines into Klan hoods and mountainous bulbous heads. Roland Barthes in his essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ states that if our reading of an image is satisfactory then our analysis offers us three messages - ‘A linguistic message; a coded iconic message and a non-coded iconic message.[9]’ While the first linguistic message is independently read, the viewer receives the other two simultaneously – both the perceptual and the cultural readings come together. There is a relation between the sign and the signified which prompts the viewer to draw upon a reservoir of cultural knowledge. The emergence of symbols and imagery in Guston’s work now allow this to happen. He explains the importance of this, putting himself firmly in the figurative camp in 1958:
‘I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.[10]’
Doreet LeVitte Harten, like many authors, places the sublime firmly at the feet of Guston’s Abstract contemporaries. She describes it in terms of ‘etiquette and court manners.’ In order for a sublime experience to occur there are a number of criteria necessary and rules to follow. In terms of American art she says that Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, rather than Guston, are the founding fathers of sublimity:
‘The sublime was to be abstract, devoid of all signifiers, so that which is signified will appear in all its decorum: that is, by stating its not being there it will have the appropriate Parousia, the manifestation of the hidden experience.[11]’
We are reminded of Kant, who spoke of a cerebral dialogue taking place within the mind – a ‘mental movement’ where, the shifting of thought beyond the minds dependence on the physical senses leads to double-mode of experience. This mode of mathematical sublime allows for an experiential idea of reason and we again see the sublime shift away from our engagement with the physical world to an internalised response – from the phenomenal world to the noumenal or supersensible realm. This echoes Burke’s treatise which places the sublime firmly in our capacity for thought – a secular argument where a God complex is no longer required to authenticate our response to greatness. If it is to be found in the self where does this put the status of the image? If the sublime previously lay in the appraisal of the lofty mountain and mighty seascapes in the natural world, and if it has shifted in terms of philosophical evolution to be exclusively an ‘experience of the mind’ – one that requires no recognisable form or image to authenticate/verify its existence, does this mean that the question of the sublime has been fully answered? Many seem to think that it is with LeVitte expanding:
‘The application of a negative theory in the arts, a theology which is based on the idea of aphaeresis (the coming to the essence by way of abstraction), haunts us still. It is therefore difficult for the catechist to see the sublime in a popular or figurative form … an endless theoretical field sustains the weakness of the image, chased out of pictorial paradise.[12]’
Originally at least, it would seem that Guston agreed. In the 1940s he was preoccupied with ambiguousness and metaphor, putting as much importance on the idea of space and scale, which became ‘as charged with meaning’ and were as inevitable to the compositions as the figures themselves. However, writing on a scrap of paper found in the artist’s studio after his death by his daughter disputes this. Guston, it would seem, was always uncomfortable with his career as an Abstract Expressionist and went so far as to denounce abstraction and its role in the cultural demise of the American people:
‘American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be ...What a sham! Abstract art hides it, hides the lie, a fake! Don’t! Let it show! It is an escape from the true feelings we have, from the “raw,” primitive feelings about the world — and us in it. In America. Where are the wooden floors — the light bulbs — the cigarette smoke? Where are the brick walls? Where is what we feel — without notions — ideas — good intentions? No, just conform to the banks — the plazas — monuments to the people who own this country — give everyone the soothing lullaby of “art.”[13]’
Guston’s great friend Ross Feld was convinced that he had only ever seemed to be an abstractionist throughout the fifties and sixties and in retrospect, the artist himself knew of this fact. He confirms it to Feld in a letter in 1979 – a shy revelation that in all the ‘playing along’ perhaps it was only in later life that he realized it was more important to be understood than to be liked. It is at this time that we see that Guston painted the things he understood. He said of the images hung together in the gallery for his final retrospective that they showed a ‘life lived.’ To move away from the tentative abstraction of his early career to the intensely personal artifacts of his everyday habits and life gave his work the integrity and gravitas he so greatly desired.
By painting easily recognizable images, Guston allows for an evolution of the sublime away from the art of the Abstract Expressionists. It would be unfair at this point to discard the image – to denounce it as the sublime of the iconoclast and misplaced devotee. The idea of the image having no use or power in our visual advancement falls aside when we once more return to Barthes’ theory on the ‘imagination of the sign.’ The relationship between sign and signifier, as we have said, imply ‘the existence for each sign, of a reservoir or organized “memory” of forms from which it is distinguished by the smallest difference necessary and sufficient to effect a change of meaning.[14]’ In terms of the evolution of the sublime, after the success of Abstract Expressionism, with its all embracing voids and verticality, there is nowhere for it to go. Robert Rosenblum writes in 1961 that, including the three other ‘masters’ of the sublime (Rothko, Still, Pollock), Newman ‘produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval moment of creation. Indeed, a quartet of the large canvases…might well be interpreted as a post-World-War II myth of Genesis.[15]’ He goes on:
‘During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone. What used to be pantheism has now become a kind of “paint-theism.”[16]’
It is hard to imagine however, where the sublime, in terms of painting at least, will go – should we just keep making the canvases bigger?
Jean-Francois Lyotard has said that realism is the ‘mainstream art of any culture’ – something that upon viewing we can instantly recognize and understand. Malpas explains Lyotard’s theory saying that realism “‘makes” the world appear real…reality is not something we know naturally but rather that a sense of reality is generated through the beliefs and ideals of particular culture, and that realist art or literature is one of the things that helps a culture create a sense of its reality.[17]’ If it is that we use signs and signifiers to draw upon a reservoir of meaning/understanding to make a judgment, and if it is that judgments such as these form the basis of our cultural reality then Lyotard places the action of the sublime back into the hands of the artist rather than the spectator. The capacity for the evolution of the sublime lies here with Nicholas Mirzoeff writing:
‘Because the sublime is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world – for example, peace, equality, or freedom – “the experience of the sublime feeling demands a sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture.” (Lyotard) Unlike the beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the creature of culture and is therefore central to visual culture.[18]’
Between 1970 and 1978 Guston kept a series of studio notes on which he sketched ideas for later works and wrote down ideas and stories – as much letters to himself as anything else. One of these notes entitled ‘Reminders’ was published in Sky Magazine in 1973. It reads:
The thickness of things.
The object painted on a store window. A shoe –
a book – to be seen instantly from a distance.
The worst thing in the world
Is to look at another painting.
Make your mind blank and try
To duplicate the object.
The images I’ve painted out.
One morning, disconsolate, I started to paint,
not watching myself.
A sense that I am painting in reverse.
I continue the mistake. In the end,
there is the image I have been wanting to see.
Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium
and permanent light green[19].
Ross Feld speaks of a type of camouflage Guston used in the 1950s to classify himself as an Abstract Expressionist. He says however, that he failed in its use speaking of the ‘permanent light green’ as an indicator of the truth within the painting. Guston was always an artist much more concerned with representation rather than abstraction. A talented draughtsman, he was in effect denying his talent in the painting of convex patterns and swirling chunks of vertical and horizontal shelves. Feld explains:
‘There remained stubborn hints and shreds of representation as well as personal psychology: a green hood shape here, tendrils that might have been legs, a form suggesting a recoiling head.[20]’
He was dubbed an Abstract Impressionist – the works had more in common with the translucent sky and light of the Impressionist painters with visible forms emerging and retreating, than he had with the Newman zips or Pollock drips. As he works through this period he becomes stronger and more forceful in his approach to the canvas. He decides it is not a feeling of freedom he has been searching for in the work but rather ‘a state of “un-freedom” where only certain things can happen, unaccountable the unknown and free must appear[21]. It is at this point that Guston creates an iconography of abstract forms – ones which begin to appear repeatedly in the work. Ashton dubs them a ‘readable vocabulary of his dialectic’ and says that by 1955 he had ‘evolved a distinctive manner of suggesting vital forms within the still-amorphous atmosphere.[22]’
The idea of an iconography of images then becomes associated with Guston’s later painting. The objects to hand, the foibles and bad habits of cigarette smoking – the clock, jars and brushes of the studio, the brick walls and piled-up shoes of the concentration camps become his new dialectic. Guston left his family in Los Angeles after the death of his brother from gangrene as the result of a car accident. The shock of his brother’s death combined with the unresolved issues of his father’s suicide led to his severing all contact with his family – he even changed his name from Goldstein to the less Jewish sounding Guston in an attempt to separate himself from his upbringing and impress his non-Jewish wife’s family. The trauma led to periods of black depression and alcoholism –self-loathing and lethargy and at other times periods of intense fevered activity. The impetus to create a catalogue of imagery may have been one founded by his career in abstraction but it now encouraged the artist to paint the motifs and symbols of his life and youth to come to terms with such. The chaos and terror of finding a dead parent becomes symbolized in the hanging lightbulbs of his boyhood closet retreat – a place in which he drew for hours on end in an attempt to deal with his grief and the place his father hung himself. The distended severed limbs – legs and feet, shoes and grasping mauling hands echo gangrenous desire – death and disease. All of these are overseen by an all-pervading, glaring bloodshot eye. Irritated by cigarette smoke – straining and unsleeping it tirelessly examines and watches, perhaps representing Guston’s exhausting desire to know and to ‘see’ things exactly as they were after the ambiguous disappointment of abstraction. In 1968 he says:
‘I started working with just common objects. Books, things on the table, my shoes on the floor. Just the most everyday objects. And it seemed to me that by just restricting myself to a single object a great deal opened up … I had a lot of stuff in that picture [Untitled, 1969], then I just covered it up with a brick wall. It felt good … And the other thing is I never saw a painting of a brick wall. That’s important too, that I wanted to paint what hadn’t been seen.[23]’
We get a sense that Guston is working through something with what now have become symbols of destruction. There is a sense of normalcy and an almost cartoon-like naivety to them in some instances – child-like paintings of the kitchen clock in rounded vibrating loops, roller-blinds and big doodled eyes peering over horizons. They are things of domesticity in but removed and made ‘other,’ abused and menaced in this perverse world. In Guston himself we see what Lyotard calls the ‘nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject … the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.[24]’ It is almost as if he has no choice but to continue producing these works until he reaches reconciliation. In the iconography of the abstract as Ashton writes, he had:
‘commenced the long peregrination to another place where symbol is all but eliminated, and where the act of painting is itself symbolical; but he had not yet succeeded in purging himself of the past, his own, and the past of painting.[25]’
However, we see it is in representing the detritus of life that Guston comes to terms with both his life and the role of painting in it. Describing one of these later works ‘The Street’ 1977,(Fig.4) with its ‘cluster of stamping knobbly legs in their boots opposed by the phalanx of arms, with their trash-can lids,[26]’ Robert Hughes writes that Guston appealed to a culture of commonality ‘whose preservation was one of the deeper focuses of his anxiety.[27]’ To sum it up we can return to the artist’s scribbled studio notes entitled simply ‘Images’ – a vitally important reminder of what not to forget in the process of creating great painting:
Afternoon.
Mended Rags.
Clock-face.
Sticks of wood behind
a brick wall. Graining.
Back Yards.
screen doors.
porches
old cars being dismantled
Venice, Calif[28].
In 1969 speaking on the idea of the image Guston uses a story about Barnett Newman to explain his thoughts on sublimity. He says:
‘And Barney is a very scrupulous guy, I think. He controls every bit. So, this blurb goes on about Barney Newman: “Mr. Barnett Newman paints the sublime.” He’s always been involved in the sublime. So Musa and I burst out in hilarity in the snow. And I wanted to telephone Knoedler’s and give them some other name. I’d say “Mr. Knoedler, I’m interested in getting a sublime painting of Mr. Newman.” “Well,” he says, “a ten-foot sublime is forty-five thousand.” So I say, “Have you got a ten thousand sublime?” Well, this is the world we live in. This is the way it is, see?[29]’
Guston places this anecdote ‘in the snow’ – at his home, with his wife. The normal everyday background of the scene juxtaposed with the large cosmopolitan New York gallery spouting sublime sentiment becomes comical – we understand the irony and Guston’s desire to poke fun. His figurative paintings were never discussed in terms of the sublime as they were in the days of the Abstract painting and certainly never twinned with notions of transcendence and revelation as Barnett Newman’s so often were. Newman is discussed almost solely in terms of the sublime because it could be said that this was the ultimate goal of his art – to create that transcendence of feeling and thought, to enlighten, to destroy and to make new. Newman, like Guston, testifies to a bombastic terrible sublime. The sublime should be no quiet utterance but a declaration of the self; recognition of all that man has to offer and the potential to become. To him, it should encompass our entire being. The title of Newman’s paintings tells us of an artist who is concerned with defining the self in terms of the here and now but also, in terms of the infinite. He attempts to express the holy, sacrificial side of man in terms of simple painted blocks and contrasting zips of colour. Lyotard writes ‘art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart[30]’ and Newman with his bold declarations - ‘Now,’ ‘Here,’ ‘Covenant,’ ‘Onement I,’ create a sense of the now within a moment – a world within a world. There is a shifting of occurrence beyond what is actually happening – a present within a present. The temporal shift in a static object – the unreal plasticity of the painted surface and flat plains, sometimes literally ‘Tundra’ of colour, visually offer no depth or vision through the work but rather an expression of the ‘here and now.’ It is as Žižek said:
‘We achieve the “determinate reflection” when we become aware that this delay is immanent, internal to the “Thing-in-itself:” the Thing-in-itself is found in its truth through the loss of its immediacy. In other words, what appears, to “external reflection,” as an Impediment is in fact a positive condition of our access to the Truth: the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not accessible to us in its immediate self-identity.[31]’
According to Newman, it was only by moving away from weighted imagery, by distorting and denying it entirely, that modern art could now seek to assert itself. This led to the creation of a ‘pure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships,[32]’forming the only possible basis for an investigation into the contemporary sublime. Newman’s art buys into a modern idea of ‘minimalist restraint’ and his intention is to ‘resassert…man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.[33]’
Perhaps, however, it would be easier to give to Newman more credibility were we not aware of the extreme calculation on the artist’s part when it came to exhibiting the works. Lyotard compares the painterly effects of Newman to that of Cezanne – the ‘rendering of perception at its birth.[34]’ However, we know that Newman designed his exhibitions of work with help from Tony Smith. This architect and sculpture is heralded as ‘a leader in the evolution of the austere, white-walled spaces that continue to prevail in the world’s museums and galleries.[35]’ The importance of the calculation becomes apparent when we look at the idea of artistic inception and the physical creation of Newman’s work. The appraisal of the paintings evokes a sense of ‘the happening’ and the sublime dread of the ‘not happening.’ This reaction is felt by the artist however at a much earlier stage – in the creation of the piece. The gallery space is crucial to the artist’s communication of devices and none more so than in the case of Barnett Newman. We know that the zips in Newman’s paintings are constructed by placing masking tape on the bare canvas and painting a solid ground over, to reveal a too-thin, severe contrast upon its removal. In some cases the tape is left on to construct its own ground – creating a different sense of depth. There is a sense that something is being uncovered and revealed to us in chinks and drips of information. We are being invited to share in some secret knowledge known only to the artist. The bold design of these paintings declare there is nothing, there is only this – happening, here and now. The energy and vivification of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are helped in no small part to photographs released depicting the ‘virile, hard-drinking macho man[36]’ hard at work creating them. Perhaps, the viewer could argue more readily for a Newman sublime had they been there at the artistic inception. Only Newman has seen the birth of the zip – the viewer is left with the afterglow of revelation. Gilbert-Rolfe comments that ‘Newman’s sublime, then, is one of limitless visualized within the terms of an activity which leaves no trace of what was there before it but returns to what began it.[37]’ This makes it sound as if major sacrifices were made by the artist but the reality is a calculated presentation of paintings with no notebook or diary entries, no sketchbooks or scraps of paper to add weight to their articulation – these were destroyed by Newman before exhibiting his first solo show at the age of forty-five. The consideration of how the work was to be viewed was his most important decision. It was a sublime geared towards the profundity of the gallery space and its inhabitants. We are reminded of Longinus and the notion of being ‘primed’ for sublimity and this is the Newmanic sublime - a calculated consideration of our cultural taste, directed at the ‘echoes of a noble mind.[38]’ Ann Tempkin writes that:
‘The choice of paintings was always his. None of his ensuing shows merely unveiled the latest work; they presented calculated clusters in which paintings cross-referenced informed one another in specific ways.[39]’
Upon viewing his painting ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimus,’ (‘Man, Heroic and Sublime’) (Fig.5) one critic wrote that if he had been informed that the painting’s name was ‘God’ he would have believed it. Peter Schjeldahl’s praise turns to ‘faint embarrassment’ however when he closely examines the sketchy content of Newman’s work. There is no denying his ambition and talent as an artist but the reality of Newman’s sublime is something else:
‘Newman made things difficult for himself by insisting on transcendent meaning. No wonder his body of work is so small. God created the world only once we’re told. Newman put himself in a position of repeatedly saying, “Let there be light,” and having it be so... But when a Newman is less than supremely powerful one feels a bit embarrassed for him.[40]’
Perhaps Newman’s intentions were honourable. Like Burke’s Enquiry, his art sought to authenticate the sublime experience away from the idea of a higher power or God. He believed in a reality that was self-evident. Like Derrida and Kant he saw sublime feeling occurring in the revelation of consciousness, away from a ‘religious or noumenal “other” of human conception.[41]’ His rhetoric and content are almost entirely the opposite of Guston’s ‘common objects’ and he felt his purpose was to ‘prevent the sublime succumbing to the domesticating effects of time and sensibility.[42]’ The works offer booming declarations of genesis, creation and the hereafter. In 1948 he says:
‘We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.[43]’
Newman strives for a theoretically qualified sublime – the more abstract and distorted the better. In his essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ he says that ‘the European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity.[44]’ He sees American art as being free from this moral struggle. The shiny new bravado of post WWII Americana allows its art to move away from such conflict. Free from the bond of European classicism, art and indeed the artist have a new role. We see the artist as anarchist and the idea of a heroic, purposeful sublime comes to the fore. Max Kozloff writes:
‘To be sure, the question for sublimity invariably emerged as a call against institutional authoritarianism and was always considered to be a meaningful gesture of defiance against repression.[45]’
The geographical shift of ‘great art,’ now governed by a new set of rules meant that the sublime now becomes purposeful – it is not just the sublime as it is, but to achieve an end.
David Craven also speaks of the artist being engagé through their work as well as with it. He makes a critical point, however, about the value claims of these artists and the ideals behind this ‘new world’ art, warning of the danger of being overly caught up in their bravado. However much they may deny their European culture and its imagery, he says that its roots lie firmly in nineteenth-century European painting:
‘It was hardly plausible, for example, when Newman contended that many of the Abstract Expressionists had transcended all conventional artistic rhetoric as well as traditional visual imagery to arrive at “spontaneous”, hence, “self-evident” and “natural” revelations of the sublime. Just as few if any viewers have experienced the sublime before these paintings without first knowing what the concept means historically, so Newman, Rothko, Motherwell, Still and Gottlieb all drew substantially if also very subtly on the formal values associated with nineteenth-century European paintings that dealt with the sublime.[46]’
This is a tricky statement to consider as we have previously seen the sublimity of Newman’s painting avowed in the immediacy of perception and the realisation that we are being called upon to ‘respond without knowing in advance …[how] to respond.[47]’ Craven says that in fact, yes – we do and should know how to respond. The myth that we cannot is being propagated by artists who themselves could not respond or create a new order without first intrinsically understanding the rules from which they have to break free. Suspicion now lies in Newman’s credentials as midwife for a modern sublime – we know that he destroyed all of his early paintings and produced his first surviving work at the age of forty. Could it be that the earlier works highlight the truth of artistic practice – that there can be no revelatory moments without some initial planning and forethought, as well as many mistakes made along the road to the sublime. These rules of creation have at their heart the notions of Renaissance and European classical construct. Craven goes on to explain:
‘Since the visual language of the Abstract Expressionists was culturally mediated by earlier visual languages and the ideological values that emerged with them, the art of the sublime painters hardly originated in “natural” utterances outside history or society. Consequently, we cannot stop with Newman’s explanation of how this anti-capitalist, socially alienated and humanly affirmative art arose as the “spontaneous” outpouring of “autonomous individuals.”[48]’
It is for this reason that we must return to Philip Guston and his for the rights of figuration. One of Newman’s closest contemporaries, we see the two names constantly linked under the banner of American Abstract Expressionism or the ‘New York school.’ Their motive and their subject matter could not have been more different yet it is Newman who wins out the battle of the sublime – held up as a poster-boy of the new-world heroic art of the modern age. Robert Hughes contests this title writing:
‘there is nothing in the paintings to justify the depths attributed to them; but so fixed has the belief in Newman’s profundity become that in some quarters the merest doubt is taken almost for anti-Semitism...So, in the midst of an all-too-willing suspension of art-world disbelief a major reputation sprouted from a miniscule base... At one point Newman said with a straight face “I thought our quarrel here was with Michelangelo.” It was not a quarrel anyone could win with a stripe.[49]’
We can imagine Guston laughing in the snow, and later, surrounded by his broken shoes, crumpled up pieces of paper, cigarette butts and clocks, thinking of Newman orchestrating sublimity in the pristine and surgically white-cubed gallery room. The contaminants and detritus of the things that make up the everyday of our life become more of a proponent for the sublime than the quasi-religious sentiment of a Newman’s Abstract Expressionism. It is in these things that we recognise the self; our ideas of existence and being have more to do with the sublime anxieties of smoking and transcendence of deprecation than they do with the primed hallowed galleried zips and stripes of Newman’s calculated sublimity. To explain, Guston often quoted Kafka who said ‘the true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.[50]’
Speaking at the University of Minnesota in 1978 Guston describes the solid figurative imagery found in the majority of his later work. He says:
‘I knew I wanted to go on and deal with concrete objects. I got stuck on shoes, shoes on the floor. I must have done hundreds of paintings of shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, just everyday objects. And the more I did the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough; I don’t think one needs to depart from it in order to make art.[51]’
If any painting could be said to typify one of these later paintings it is ‘Painting, Smoking, Eating,’ (Fig.6) a work in oil measuring approximately seventy by one hundred inches. The protagonist of the piece (often said to be Guston himself), is a butter-bean shaped head, lying in bed, smoking. Its Cyclops eye stares, unblinking into space. A lit cigarette is poked into the space a mouth should occupy – like a chimney emitting fumes. There is a vulnerability to the curved pink prostrated bean-head jabbed through with this smoking funnel – letting acrid air out, as much as into, the face. It looks disconsolately into the distance. ‘Occupy,’ is perhaps the word best suited to describe the work – its subject is occupancy, the occupation of an enclosed room, filled with a tableaux of ordinary things. The things are made sinister by their lumped, heaped togetherness. They lose their purpose in the real world and are now rubbish and things of scrutiny rather than use, displayed as they are on the artist’s table – ready for examination or dissection. Of the smoker, Ashton writes:
‘Into this arrangement, so striking in its summary of all Guston’s idiosyncratic compositional habits, the unnerving head of the painter thrusts itself...The painter, then, is there to disrupt a world of esthetically arranged forms, is, in fact, the unwelcome prophet dedicated to disturbing the status quo.[52]’
A plate of American French-fries lies on a plate on the bed. They are sharp jutting shards of yellow fat against the soft curved head and blanket – cake-sliced representations of a New-America fast-food culture. They are grease filled chunks of bad nutrition designed to fill a hole rather than nourish the body. Time honoured anxieties reside here, of smoking and eating too much, procrastination in a bed of filth surrounded by the physical manifestations of a worrisome life – the light-bulb pull-cord come hangman’s rope and the mounds of shoes – a father’s disappointment. Guston described the process of representing this figure akin to creating a golem – a duplicate of the self that lives in a parallel or different world. He said ‘I like the feeling that I don’t have a painting in there, I’ve got a being in there[53]’ and explains the importance of creating, not only a painting concerned with the legitimacy of forms and objects but also with creating a space – the importance of occupancy:
‘But when you have something to deal with, a character or a person, well, then, he’s got to have an environment. He sleeps, he eats, he paints, he does things...And again I’m very interested in Max Beckmann...He’s made a place, and it’s very important to make a place.[54]’
Many of Guston’s paintings feature ubiquitous Ku Klux Klan hooded figures, infiltrating common scenes and familiar habitats. If before Guston sought to express the importance of occupancy and space, with these hoods he portrays the degeneration of place. Most often, the hooded characters are described as ‘cartoon-like’ – their inspiration drawn as much from Guston’s favourite ‘Mutt and Jeff’ and ‘Krazy Kat’ comic strips as from his abhorrence for the organised ritual violence and cruelty of the K.K.K. They feature throughout Guston’s figurative painting from the dramatic 1930s work ‘The Conspirators’ (Fig.7) to ‘The Studio,’ (Fig.8) painted in 1969. The cartoonish quality of the paintings stems not only from the characters in them but also in the brash colours of the scenes. They echo the lurid palette of early technicolour cartoons. In ‘The Studio,’ the oversized caricatured hand of the hooded figure holds a paintbrush which traces the outline of another hooded figure onto canvas – a hood painting a hood. The obligatory cigarette once more juts out from the space the mouth should occupy, smoke rising as if from a child’s drawing of a house and chimney. He holds a palette and is surrounded by the artist’s accoutrement of jars, brushes and paint-cans. Lit from above by the ever present hanging bare bulb, the hood itself is stitched together in large patchwork squares. There is an amateurish quality to the gown – it is homemade and unprofessional. The violence originated in the home and was stitched together in domesticity. It now returns to that space to ponder and paint. This stitching detail is reflected in the hood’s own portrait and we see a nightmarish cartoon-like quality to the slits that he peers through, contemplating his own image. Of these slits, echoing the bald simplistic eyes of the cartoon figure, Guston said:
‘And its amazing how this formula, the slits for eyes, became so expressive ... And the range of expressions you can get with those two slits is incredible. They can look tender, they can look angry, surprised. Its stylized like in a Noh play, the stylization has a range.[55]’
They humanise what we have ascribed to be a monster. The normalization of the hooded figure is what makes it more menacing than the figure himself. What we realise is that the hood is simply that – a hood covering a figure that resides, eats and sleeps within a home, the same as ourselves. Where Guston first desired to know what it would be like to be evil, to ‘plan and to plot,’ with these hooded figures he asks about the reality of evil and its place in the surrounding normal world. To plan and to plot but to return home to everyday things and carry on with the minutiae of everyday living – the smoking and eating; the decision making, the painting. Of this he explains:
‘There’s a whole series where I made artists out of them. Like, did they paint? If they do all these other things, why can’t they paint? Be artists? And, actually, what would they paint? They’d paint themselves. And I have some where they’re going to art exhibitions and they’re arguing about art and talking about art ... Well, it could be all of us. We’re all hoods.[56]’
Let us compare these works to Newman’s celebrated ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimus.’ Painted in 1950, it measures a colossal seven foot, eleven inches by seventeen foot, nine inches. It hangs horizontally inviting the eye to read it from left to right rather than vertically which one would perhaps expect from a painting declarative of sublimity and transcendence. It boldly testifies to the idea of ‘Man, Heroic and Sublime’ engulfing the viewer in heaving blocks of red, divided by five strips or ‘zips’ of various colours. Solidity and weight are juxtaposed with light and dark slashes of striped consideration which, traversing the painting from top to bottom, recede and push forward in the red glare. They dip in and out of our vision almost harmonising the painting like a series of musical notes on a hymn sheet. Looking upon it the main theme becomes one of confrontation. To be accosted by such an expanse of red is an unnatural sensation as it does not appear with such ferocity and expanse anywhere in the natural world. Charles Harrison explains this sensation writing:
‘In the natural order of things, bright red is usually seen as the colour of some tangible object. It is the very opposite of a “field colour” – a colour that denotes space ... The experience of looking into a field of red is thus somehow disturbing, particularly in a painting taller than a person. Red is – as it were – the conventional colour of “no entry.”[57]’
By not allowing the viewer to look through the painting and by denying any tangible recognisable imagery for the eye to latch onto, Newman calls for a different type of consideration with regards to the artwork. We must ask, when confronted with not even a void in the pictorial device, how can a sensate reaction such as the sublime occur? Lyotard feels that it is in our encounter with the impossible stating:
‘Thus, when he seeks sublimity in the here-and-now he breaks with the eloquence of Romantic art but he does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible. The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the “it happens” is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this it has to witness.[58]’
The figurative bouncing cartooned imagery of Philip Guston could not be more different to the omni-aspirational blasts of Newman’s Vir. Guston simply asks that we do what comes naturally to us – we look upon and recognise an image, draw from a bank of related signifiers and come to conclusions about that image; by then placing it apart from our denoted signifiers we draw new conclusions and inform ourselves as to the meaning of the painting. The progress of man’s cultural evolution is highlighted by this ability to reckon with the familiar and recognisable and to put it in another ‘place,’ – creating new sets of identifiers and so on. By painting something and by painting nothing, Newman asks for not only a different type of reaction to painting but that new criteria governing the rules of appraisal are drawn up. When a failure to comprehend is the conclusion we draw from these abstract works, he dresses it up as a sublime transcendence of thought for the new age. Lyotard defines his actions as such:
‘The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety, a term with strong connotations in modern philosophies of existence and of the unconscious. It gives to waiting…but suspense can also be accompanied by pleasure…the joy obtained by the intensification of being that the event brings with it. It is at the very least a sign, the question mark itself, the way in which it happens is withheld and is announced: Is it happening? The mark of the question is ‘now,’ now like the feeling that nothing might happen, the nothingness is now.[59]’
When we compare Guston’s ‘common objects’ to Newman’s ‘colouristic sensations’ we are reminded of the difference in their artistic intention as well as in their opposing styles. Guston was not concerned as to whether the sublime was ‘now’ or whether the idea of ‘the happening’ or ‘not happening’ could be appropriated and represented by painting. The world was happening and through depicting the very ordinary and sometimes brutal things of his surroundings, he managed to categorise his place in it. Through the action of painting, one could set oneself free and this came from appropriating the humble objects of the everyday and the domestic. Artworks such as ‘Vir Heroicus’ led to the categorisation of painting in terms of philosophy and theory rather than practice.
In 1969, Guston’s abandonment of abstraction led him to paint what he called ‘the brutality of the world.[60]’ He describes it as a rebirth of both his methodology and subject matter, renewing his passion for painting. He strove for authenticity in the immediacy of forms rather than the impulsive gesturing of the Abstract Expressionists and became obsessed with the notion of what things actually were and how they fit into the telling of a story. He announced ‘I want to see what it looks like,’ emphasising the desire to capture the reality of objects in a space to express what had only before been possible through the creation of his abstract art. This abrupt shift was seen by many as juvenile and even heretic with one reviewer going so far as to denounce Guston as going from ‘mandarin to stumblebum.[61]’ Arthur Danto explains:
‘The term “mandarin” was intended to diminish what had set Guston apart as an abstractionist. The paintings were too dainty, too light and airy by contrast with the heavy pigment of the true Expressionists to be considered authentic. The new paintings were then seen as an opportunistic bid for that missed authenticity. They were coarse, juvenile, and demotic.[62]’
Guston chose to ignore these sentiments, focusing on the cathartic and purifying ritual of creating recognisable imagery. For him, there was clarity in the grotesquery of hooded figures pawing through the common objects of household living. They begin to inhabit familiar rooms and buildings, long abandoned by routine or normalcy. The hoods, ‘flogging each other, bloody hands and books[63]’ take centre stage in Guston’s paintings. They infiltrate the banal habitats of the everyday and turn them into warped desecrated spaces. That Guston would chose such a subject matter following the success of his career in abstraction is notable in terms of art history. It was according to Guston however, a choice made through necessity. Dore Ashton writes:
‘During the Chicago riots, Guston worked furiously. He painted shoes like buildings, clocks, stony books, buildings like primitive pueblos. Headlike shapes mashed after rioting. Owlish heads and rapid, choreographed conversations between disembodied hands. Brick walls appeared, reminiscent of his old holocaust allusions to suffocating imprisonment, and with them the familiar hooded figures. He was off on an irreversible orgy of grotesquerie.[64]’
The colour-field paintings of Guston’s peers are often linked to the sublime, said to inspire transcendence and enlightenment. Newman had theorised that this lay in the idea of ‘the happening’ and the ‘not happening.’ The suspense of looking, but of then seeing the unrecognisable, yet also familiar blocks of colour, leads to strong reactions – heart-sinking thrills of non-recognition. The disappointment and suspense of the encounter leads to a type of sudden unexpected realisation – an epiphany of thought and feeling. This sensation can categorise the work as sublime, but in terms of the paralogical assault rather than in the appraisal of well rendered recognisable imagery. Our ability to engage with the concept of an artwork created solely of and for itself promotes a new way of seeing and opens new avenues for thought and appreciation. If it is that we have evolved from wondering at the smooth polished perfection of Classical Greek sculpture and European Renaissance art to an engagement with the non-figurative heroic pictorial assaults of the American Abstract Expressionists, how does an artist like Guston hope to create the sublime from horrifying tangible painted forms in order to further this evolution?
We can consider Edmund Burke’s theory of terror and the sublime. The notion of threat and its capacity to influence the mind is explored in his treatise ‘On the Sublime’ with Burke suggesting that it is a necessary component of producing sublime feeling:
‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.[65]’
While it has been generally understood there is a sense of ‘letting go’ or losing control in the sublime experience, here Burke implies that control is taken away. Previous theories of the sublime indicate that the sublime is inspired by luxuriousness (Addison) or ‘exalted sentiment’ (Longinus) whereas Burke explains that ‘when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible.[66]’ However, if we can distance the site of pain outside the sphere of our physical existence its influence changes:
‘At certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be (pleasurable), and they are delightful, as we everyday experience.[67]’
Paul Crowther has termed this equation Burke’s ‘safety clause.[68]’ He queries humanity’s willing exposure to pain or shock in terms of Burke’s theory and says it is at this point that we see the sublime becoming a ‘culturally prevalent tendency.[69]’ He claims that due to the monotony of existence it is part of human nature to wish to experience the intense effect of the sublime and the distancing of this pain allows us to do so. It is down to our recognition of the act that we subsequently develop a greater form of consciousness. As Luke Gibbons writes:
‘what was unusual, and indeed unsettling, about the shift in cultural sensibility effected by the Enquiry was its identification of ‘terror’ and the figure of the body in pain as the basis of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience.[70]’
By painting masked figures Guston removes accountability for their actions. In their garish horror world they are free to wander and desecrate as they please, riding around ‘in their black cars through deserted squares, hauling grainy hefts of wood for their eventual crosses. [71]’ Hidden from view, they are blameless in their activity, blindly exploring, tearing down and even then assimilating into their environment. We become witness to a kind of cartoon genocide, with the familiarity of the recurring motifs and arrangements making them even more terrifying and repulsive. Guston shepherds their movements, becoming both watcher and director in the grotesque mummery. He felt he was ‘like Babel with his Cossacks, I feel as if I have been living with the Klan, riding around empty streets, sitting in their rooms smoking, looking at light bulbs.[72]’ (Fig.9)
According to Burke, we understand that terror and astonishment when confronted with the sublime object form sublime feeling. We inherently invest in the object its sense of terror/sublimity which in turn informs the mind of its astonishment. He says that ‘whatever therefore is terrible, with regards to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of dimensions or not.[73]’ As Crowther says:
‘What Burke is in fact doing, then…is not simply redescribing the phenomenology of the sublime passion, but … showing that it arises from two different ways of being affected by the objects – namely through their direct overwhelming impact on the senses, or through the mediation of ideas of pain and danger.[74]’
Peter de Bolla also examines the notion of our internalization of the external object in his ‘Discourse of the Sublime’ saying that ‘all internal states can be translated back into external effects in order to be retranslated into internal sensation.[75]’
Guston frequently refers to himself as the director of the images rather than the painter or creator of such. Like a movie reel, chopped up and exhibited in pieces, the figurative 1970s paintings show us a vernacular series of household scenes, appropriated and returned back to the viewer with an ugly, menacing polish. If there is humor in the work it belongs to the persecutors, idly fingering possessions and turning them into something else – tainted, defiled and contaminated by their presence. We now internalize the commonality of the scene and its objects, translating them into adulterated and polluted remnants of a life once lived. The fear of stigmatization stirs something deep within and we ask, where is the pure naivety of the abstract sublime transcendence? Danto also recognizes:
‘It is one thing to aspire to the sublime. It is another to bring into art the preoccupations of a man with ordinary appetites, who worries about love and eating too much, and how to give up smoking, and not just about being evil, but being bad.[76]’
We must also be suspicious of Guston’s intentions throughout. There is a calculated attempt on his part to portray the thrill of debauchery. Were it that the figures seemed exclusively cruel we would accept his pleas as merely the reproducer of such activity. However, the humor and child-like consideration of the hooded figures in the canvases often infer the humane side of the horror. One cannot forget Guston’s desire to understand ‘what would it be like to be evil? To plan and to plot?’ At one point he writes: ‘Now, this week, in reverse, I made a huge and TOWERING vast rock – with platforms – ledges, for my forms to be on – and to play out their private drama. A Theater – maybe? A STAGE?[77]’ This oft-referred to notion of ‘plotting’ the scenes suggests that Guston himself is the one in power – manipulating not only the figures in the paintings to his bidding, but also the viewer’s responses and internalization.
Burke’s Enquiry frequently deals with the notion of power. He says that ‘besides those things which directly suggest the idea of danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.[78]’ Because the enjoyment of pleasure requires no ‘great effort’ on our part, Burke theorizes that pain and threat (death) are more readily associated with power. We can never be ‘free from terror[79]’ in the presence of such and it is this ‘power’ that is the driving force of our submission. The superior effects of ‘strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together.[80]’ Again, our will or choice plays no role in these effects. Burke examines the potency of power’s effect upon the mind concluding that terror is its constant companion. One cannot exist without the force of the other. The reader is left in no doubt as to the terrible and forceful nature of the sublime. The sublime object is defined as such by the viewer due to the horror we encounter upon its appraisal. The complexity of such an equation lies not with the object itself however, but in our own capacity to then realize the terror of the infinite. De Bolla sees the act as enabling:
‘The process of analysis to produce further and further sublime objects, greater and greater astonishment, more and more terrifying power. It is not the sublime as such which presents the danger of infinite excess, but the discourse which examines, describes and analyses its causes and effects.[81]’
There is a goading quality to Guston’s scenes – paintings such as ‘A Day’s Work,’ 1970 (Fig.10) and ‘Flatlands,’1970 (Fig.11) are the work of an enabler. He deliberately wishes to construct images of anxiety and sorrow, discomforting the viewer. He repeatedly uses the same forms in his paintings to further our analyses of horror – seeing the same characters in different positions places them at different points in our comprehension – the kitchen, the workshop, the town hall. By inhabiting the different spaces, they occupy different roles in our witness of the infestation/occupation – the domestic hub of the house, the workplace, the town square. The threat of violence and persecution, the removal of dignities – the carnality of the ugly, mashed-together gangs of hoods and heads, articulate the Burkean sublime – that of terror and fear. Its proponent was fully cognizant of his involvement writing ‘Somehow, I think I’ve always felt that creating was an evil thing – Satan’s work – Maybe therein lies the shame.[82]’ His willingness to engage with such subject matter was however, forgiven by many friends and critics who saw it as part of Guston’s ferocious desire to ‘see’ exactly what was there in the world before him. Ashton writes:
‘Since matter and form assumed a life of their own as soon as they were deployed on his canvas, Guston’s suspicion that he could create a parallel universe had a certain justness...The cultivation of anxiety as a method of artistic discourse was practiced by many in various arts.[83]’
On the uncomfortable subject matter, Guston himself surmised that the negativity and ruthlessness of the painting also showed the viewer something beyond the scenes themselves, writing ‘what we see is the wonder of what it is that is being seen. Perhaps it is the anxiety of painting itself.[84]’
Returning to Burke’s theory he says that sublime feelings occur in the self when we are in a state of threat or endangerment. It moves sublimity away from the confines of the natural world and picturesque imagery, and into a position concerned with the experience of the viewer. Since it is the grotesque and disorientating effect of Guston’s paintings that are the most evocative we can now quantify our reaction in terms of the sublime. Separating the notion of beauty and the sublime are key to our identification of this point. Burke does this in order to invest in the sublime a type of integrity. The fervor of our passion is not felt due to a weakness or vulnerability of the mind but is bound to our sense of self-actualization. Crowther says:
‘by showing that the sublime is intrinsically connected with them, Burke is able to invest the sublime passion with an intensity and, as it were, existential magnitude that more than compensates for its lack of positivity.[85]’
The separation of the sublime and the beautiful is not an example of sublimity’s ‘axiological inferiority[86]’ – that is to say, an inferior philosophical value judgment of the sublime, but rather a critical conclusion drawn from our behavior that is identified by Burke before we can begin to understand the qualities that evoke these feelings. In 1978 Guston describes the action of looking at his work almost exclusively in terms of the experience of seeing and, in doing so, even proposes a new theory of what art actually is:
‘I started to shake when I painted this picture. God there is no picture plane! It is just real, that’s all there is – just real – no plane at all – What nonsense – the idea of a plane – No – all there finally is left is just the moment – the second – of life’s gesture – fixed forever – in an image – there – to be seen…There is no order especially – if there is an order to it at all, I don’t know it – don’t comprehend it – it is like nothing I’ve done before – not one area in this mound stops to let you look at it. Ah, so that’s what “art” is – lets you stop – isolate it – lets us “see” it – but here in this new picture there is “nothing” to see – except multitudes of masses, that go on forever – in the mind. You could mingle with this crowd, move into it – submerge yourself in it – be part of it. You would hear voices, murmurs, weeping.[87]’
According to Burke’s theory, Guston’s work at this time contains all the elements necessary to evoke the sublime experience – terror, passion, disorder and fear. Most of all, it robs the viewer of the standard expectations of looking at a painting and reduces it to a chaotic and vulnerable state of not knowing. It is in this condition that the sublime becomes a psychological enquiry and, in doing so, allows for new criteria essential to create the experience in the future. It has become something else. As John Baillie said:
‘The Sublime dilates and elevates the Soul, Fear sinks and contracts it; yet both are felt upon viewing what is great and awful.[88]’
In his investigation Burke also considers sublimity in terms of our historical situation as well as in the aesthetic and philosophical sphere of Enlightenment thought. The enquiry is not only a study of aesthetic theory but reads as a ‘critique of universal reason[89]’ in the industrial age. We are encouraged to advocate‘aesthetics of intervention’ and to consider the ‘triumph of sympathy.[90]’ In what Luke Gibbons calls a ‘crucial departure from dominant Enlightenment thinking,[91]’ Burke’s theory of the sublime can be seen as ‘an attempt to prevent the aesthetic from becoming, in effect, an anesthetic.[92]’ It is a consideration of not only our passions, tastes and beauty but the basis of an ethical rationale. A cornerstone of Burke’s theory of the sublime and the beautiful is the notion of terror. Astonishment, says Burke, is the sublime affecting the mind in its ‘highest degree.[93]’ This inspires in us a great passion but Burke proposes that we see its origins in all pervading fear. At the point where our minds are ‘robbed’ of comprehension and reason we see ‘its motions are suspended with some degree of horror’ and that ‘whatever is terrible, with regards to sight, is sublime too.[94]’ It is only what is ‘analogous to terror[95]’ that produces the strongest human emotion and it is this that Burke considers the ultimate source of the sublime. Pain, therefore, is the ‘king of the terrors.[96]’ Burke’s concept of love is married to ‘violent effects’ and madness; passion is linked to horror and it is darkness rather that light which is more productive of the sublime. In light of this, Crowther evaluates his theory of the ‘sympathetic sublime’ explaining its necessity:
‘If an individual did not have this capacity for aesthetic experience, but responded to the negation of life only with fear or aversion, then we might describe that individual as... lacking a form of existential courage.[97]’
Burke’s alternative vision for social empathy encourages us to look to a ‘sympathetic sublime’ propounding the importance of ‘fellow-feeling’ playing a major role in further Enlightenment thoughts and objectives. We can consider the role of empathy when looking upon Guston’s figurative painting. Like Burke, he worried about the idea of the aesthetic becoming anaesthetic, abandoning abstract expressionism for the constructed Klan hoods and imagery of later works. He describes the necessity of doing so at the New York Studio School in 1969 saying:
‘I was thinking on the way downtown, how the origin of art in the beginning, the origin of expression, was image making. Every time I see an abstract painting now I smell mink coats, you know what I mean? It’s really terrible. Terrible brainwashing…it’s a terrible thing. Image making is the most fascinating…it’s the only thing. The rest is just a lot of shit, making colours and selling yourself a bill of goods.[98]’
To understand the connection between empathy and Guston we once more must consider the idea of the grotesque – the bizarre and unnatural shapes, mish-mash of forms and characters in his work. The word refers to a fifteenth century derivative of the word ‘grotto,’ coming from the decorative elements found in Italian excavated cave dwellings. We see the grotesque in art previously employed by Francisco de Goya. His macabre prints of witches pulling dead men’s teeth, hacked up limbs and asylums and his black paintings depicting such torments as the cannibalization of flesh, speak both of another world and our own. Created at a time of civil unrest and violence in his eighteenth century Spain, Goya’s grotesquery is ever more starkly illustrated when contrasted against his catalogue of tame and, at times, even lovable caricature/portraiture of the royal court. The work had a profound effect on Guston who saw in the artist a contemporary – somebody who saw the terror of the world and re-invented depiction to create a separate world, one that strongly confirmed the realities of our own. Like Goya, he empathized with the cruelty of life and sought to express it to cathartic effect. He wrote:
‘Our whole lives (since I can remember) are made up of the most extreme cruelties of holocausts. We are the witnesses of hell. When I think of the victims it is unbearable. To paint, to write, to teach in the most dedicated sincere way is the most intimate affirmation of creative life we possess in these despairing years.[99]’
Baudelaire wrote of Goya that his merit lay in ‘having created a credible form of the monstrous.’ He goes on: ‘all those distortions, those bestial faces, those diabolic grimaces of his are impregnated with humanity.[100]’ Guston too works into his figures and scenes a type of monstrous humanity – a transmogrification of human forms and common objects to subversive, warped yet recognizable scenes. We often associate the sublime with a transcendence of thought and notions of epiphany, with artworks revealing to us concepts that put our consciousness on a higher plane. In this omniscient setting we imagine we will learn the secrets of the universe – enlightenment and revelation. The work of Philip Guston does something rather different. By showing us things ‘as they are’ – by being concerned with the act of truly seeing and conveying this to us in the form of the grotesque, we, the viewer, are made to recognize our capacity for fear, degeneration, cruelty and mockery. By depicting objects found in the kitchen sink of life, he gives us something familiar to engage with, rather than the ambiguousness of Abstract Expressionism. We empathize with our own pathetic reality and deterioration – we see sublimity in our realization of what Burke called the ‘triumph of sympathy.’ He writes:
‘As our creator has designed us, we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportional delight; and there most, where our sympathy is most wanted, in the distresses of others.[101]’
Philip Guston was an artist of integrity and mindfulness. He greatly felt the responsibility of his role, even to the point of defining art in a series of Laws, almost as a mantra to himself so that he would not forget:
‘The Laws of Art are generous laws. They are not definable because they are not fixed. These Laws are revealed to the Artist during creation and cannot be given to him. They are not knowable. A work cannot begin with these Laws as in a diagram. They can only be sensed as the work unfolds. When the forms and space move toward their destined positions, the artist is then permitted to become a victim of these Laws, the prepared and innocent accomplice for the completion of the work. His mind and spirit, his eyes, have matured and changed to a degree where knowing and not knowing become a single act.
It is as it these Governing Laws of Art manifest themselves through him.[102]’
By adopting the role of a conduit and by proposing a philosophy of art that was removed from the calculated urbanity of the New York School and galleries, Guston places the idea of sublimity back in the hands of the artist. He portrayed the brutality of the world in a series of common objects – clocks, cigarettes and hands with hooded figures echoing the Burkean sublime of terror and violence. It has been established that notions of violence and pain are analogous to terror - we are reminded of Burke who says that they have a superior effect on the mind and so become testifiers to the modern sublime; the sublime of the everyday and the abhorrent. Guston likened himself to a director of images. Like Goya, who painted the macabre and grotesque in scenes of civil war and monstrous dreams, Guston puts together a series of evil Klan hoods defiling the familiar domestic spaces of our everyday living. Through portraying images of evil and discarding the lofty sentiment of the high sublime, he propounds Edmund Burke’s triumph of sympathy. That we recognise degeneration and suffering shows a type of social empathy – the sublime of terror morphs into a sublime of ‘fellow feeling.’ We can now chart our cultural evolution in terms of compassionate thought – the epiphany of the sublime mirrors this epiphany of sympathy.
Throughout his career, Guston sought a feeling of ‘freedom’ and ‘unfreedom.’ He constantly changed and developed his work and its content, often away from the popular modes of practice adopted by his peers. He shunned both abstraction and pop art to remain true to his own painting, making a ‘moral choice’ to retain his own integrity and in order to progress. He decided that the loss of faith in the idea of the image was a loss from which we would greatly suffer – artistically and culturally it was a ‘step back’ in our development and crucially, he felt that this denoted the abstract as a lie or ‘cover up,’ going so far as to link it to the downfall of all American culture. In his painting, we see an alternative vision for sublimity, away from the galleried transcendence of Newman or Rothko. In him, we see a reaffirmation of the artistic responsibility for sublime evolution – a sensitivity to ideas is required, one that is acquired through cultural accumulation. The sublime now becomes a ‘creature of culture[103]’ – it no longer resides solely in the natural or religious world and we no longer need the towering mountain or religious deity to authenticate its existence. Shaw writes that ‘In the discourse of the sublime, we thus become aware that all points of origin such as God, nature, or mind are merely effects of the combinatory power of language.[104]’ In Guston’s adoption of a discourse that is familiar and recognisable he places the sublime squarely in the figurative:
‘The only thing I have is my radicalism against art. All that abstract shit – museums and art history aesthetics. What a lie – lie! The only true impulse is realism, Arty art screws you in the end; always be on guard against it![105]’
He created an iconography of images, unique to himself. The cataloguing of motifs founded in the pain and suffering of his youth allowed Guston to deal with the grief of his father’s suicide and brother’s death. They are instantly recognisable as ‘Guston’ – hanging bulbs and staring Cyclopean eyes denoted not only the detritus of a ‘life lived’ but also allowed for a cathartic rebirth of imagery in his painting:
‘Shoes. Rusted iron. Mended rags. Seams. Dried bloodstains. Pink paint. Bricks. Bent nails and pieces of wood. Brick walls. Cigarette butts. Smoking. Empty booze bottles. How would bricks look flying in the air – fixed in their gravity – falling? A brick fight. Pictures hanging on nails in walls. The hands of clocks. Green window shades. Two – or three-story brick buildings. Endless black windows. Empty streets.[106]’
It was as if he had to create a bank of images familiar and unique to himself in order for him to see the world in the way that others must see it. Having invested so heavily in the idea of the abstract, it only became possible for the artist to develop, to move forward and to ‘see,’ by painting these brick walls and cigarette butts. In abandoning the abstract, it is as if he were made blind and had to learn to feel an object in order to know what it was. Without this rebirth, Guston’s art would have lingered and been made stale by a movement and style in which he no longer believed sustainable to the development of painting. He reminds us: ‘If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean these is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place. I paint what I want to see.[107]’
By comparing Guston to Newman we see that the reality of living and working as an artist on the periphery of a New York School or gallery driven art scene allowed for an organic development of the sublime. It is one that occurs naturally in life, in the ‘figuring out’ and small epiphanies/wonders of the intensely personal and everyday routine. When we contrast this with the theoretically qualified abstract sublime of Guston’s peers, which lies in the rigid formulised gallery art of the New York school what we have is a real quantifiable lifelong investigation versus a philosophical calculation. It is not enough to simply announce oneself as sublime or ones work as transcendent – hearkening genesis and creation. Instead, we must return to Guston, in the studio, writing reminders on scraps of paper; the screwing up and casting aside of abstract ideas, the return to and wonderment at the everyday. He writes to himself near the end of his life in 1978:
‘No good to paint in the head – what happens is what happens when you put the paint down – you can only hope that you are alert – ready – to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing – a being. Believe in this miracle – it is your only hope. To will this transformation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don’t matter. They collapse anyway in front of the painting.[108]’
[1] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations, University of California Press, 2011, p.31
[2] Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.138
[3] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.193
[4] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, University of California Press, 1990, p.90-91
[5] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston,p.96
[6] Ibid. p.97
[7] Op.Cit
[8] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.47
[9] Barthes, Roland, The Rhetoric of the Image, The Photography Reader, Ed. Wells, Liz, 2003, p. 120-124
[10] Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1991, p.397
[11] LeVitte Harten, Doreet, ‘Creating Heaven,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morley, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, p.73
[12] Op.Cit.
[13] Mayer, Musa, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, Knofp, 1998, p.170
[14] Barthes, Roland, ‘The Imagination of the Sign,’ Barthes: Selected Writings, Ed. Sontag, Susan, p.221
[15] Rosenblum, Robert, ‘The Abstract Sublime,’1961, The Sublime, Ed. Morley, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, p.111
[16] Ibid.p.113
[17] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003, p.44
[18] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge 1998, p.9
[19] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.315
[20] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston, Counterpoint, 2003, p.85
[21] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, p. 106
[22] Op.Cit
[23] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversation, p.221-223
[24] Lyotard, Jean-Francois, ‘What is Postmodernism?’ Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, Ed. Lodge, David, Wood, Nigel, Pearson Education Limited, Third Edition, 2008, p.419
[25] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, p.83
[26] Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New, p.398
[27] Op.Cit
[28] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.315
[29] Ibid.p.109
[30] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Contemporary Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2009, p.33
[31] Kay, Sarah, Žižek, A Critical Introduction, Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.35
[32] Newman, Barnett, ‘The Sublime is Now,’ The Contemporary Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2009, p.26
[33] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006, p.121
[34] Morely, Simon, The Contemporary Sublime, p.37
[35] Schjeldahl, Peter, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, Thames and Hudson, 2008, p.117
[36] Chilvers, Ian, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004
[37] Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime,’ The Sublime, Ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2010, p.139
[38] Longinus, On the Sublime, p.6
[39] Tempkin, Ann, Barnett Newman, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2002, p.21
[40] Schjeldahl, Peter, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, p.118
[41] [41] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.119
[42] [42] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.122
[43] Harrison, Charles, ‘Abstract art: Reading Barnett Newman’s Eve,’ Frameworks for Modern Art, Ed. Gaiger, Jason, Yale University Press, 2003, p.130
[44] Morely, Simon, The Contemporary Sublime, p.26
[45] Frascina, Frascina, Pollock and After, The Critical Debate: Second Edition, Routledge, 2000, p.35
[46] Frascina, Frascina, Pollock and After…p.255
[47] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.123
[48] Frascina, Frascina, Pollock and After…p.225
[49] Hughes, Robert, American Visions, The Epic History of Art in America, Knopf, 2009, p.493-493
[50] Kafka, Franz, Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way, in ‘Dearest father: Stories and Other Writings,’ New York: Schocken Books, 1954
[51] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.281
[52] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston,p.178
[53] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.226
[54] Op.Cit
[55] Ibid. p.159
[56] Ibid. p. 224-225
[57] Harrison, Charles, ‘Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman’s Eve,’ Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Gaiger, Jason, Yale University Press, 2003, p.134
[58] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Unpresentable: The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Contemporary Sublime, ed. Morely, Simon, Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press, 2009, p.30
[59] Op.Cit
[60] Storr, Robert, ‘View from the Bridge,’ Frieze, Issue 87, Nov – Dec, 2004
[61] Danto, Arthur C., Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life, Columbia University Press, 2005, p.134
[62] Ibid. p.135
[63] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, p.159
[64] Ibid. p.156
[65] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.36
[66] Op.Cit
[67] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.37
[68] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.123
[69] Ibid p.128
[70] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland, University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.20
[71] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study of Philip Guston,p.162
[72] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p164
[73] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.36
[74] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.119
[75] DeBolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime, Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, Blackwell, 1989
[76] Danto, Arthur C., Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life,p.134
[77] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston, p.50
[78] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.59
[79] Op.Cit
[80] Ibid. p.60
[81] Ibid.
[82] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston,p.3
[83] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p121-123
[84] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p123
[85] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.117
[86] Op.Cit
[87] Feld, Ross, Guston in Time, Remembering Philip Guston,p8
[88] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge,2006, p.54
[89] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland: aesthetics, politics, and the colonial sublime, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.166
[90] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland,p.110
[91] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland, p.4
[92] Op. Cit
[93] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.53
[94] Op. Cit
[95] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1990, p.36
[96] Op. Cit
[97] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.130
[98] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations, University of California Press, 2010, p.109
[99] Ashton, Dore, A Critical Study…p177
[100] Barasch, Moshe, Theories of Art. 2. From Wincklemann to Baudelaire, Routledge, 2000, p381
[101] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.42
[102] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.310
[103] Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture,’ The Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, Routledge 1998, p.9
[104] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.11
[105] Coolidge, Clark, Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, Conversations,p.311
[106] Ibid. p.308
[107] Ibid. p.311
[108] Ibid. p.314