Why Charles White Gives an Illusion of Crumpled Paper in Hia Art

Unhappy Medium

John Haber
in New York City

Frank Stella's Bamboo and Kurt Schwitters

One wrestles with massive industrial scrap like animals that take escaped their cages. The other turns a fragment of a word into the totality of his art. 1 demands an art apart from and larger than life. The other slowly amasses the record of a civilization.

Frank Stella and Kurt Schwitters both cherish leftovers similar elements of a lost linguistic communication. Both seem content to let their assemblies make themselves. And both have an unlikely faith in painting. After that, any resemblance is purely coincidental—or is it?

One insists that he has never stopped painting. So how tin can his constructions, now unpainted, move freely in the round? The other gives his medium, collage, a nonsense name. So how can he sustain painting as a bones creature condolement?

Two lovely gallery shows become i puzzling over a gap of over half a century. I ended the spring of 2003 wondering at the simplicity of such words as painting or cribbing. Thanks to exhibitions in 2005 and 2006, extending one's view Stella's career at either end, ane can keep puzzling fifty-fifty longer. A postscript even has me imagining Stella as architect.

Defying gravity

Frank Stella has remained his own man, and yous know men. His early blackness paintings, starting before 1960, withal look defiantly simplistic. They assert their presence quite as much equally modernist painting. The industrial-strength oils pick up where enamel firm paint for Jackson Pollock left off. Black, divers sometimes every bit the absence of light, positively glows. Betwixt stripes, the unpainted canvas shines with a softer white.

His discovery of the unpainted sail begins from the moment he landed in New York. Even the titles of his paintings from 1958 often refer to New York streets and neighborhoods, at a time when he first took a studio in downtown Manhattan. That year stands between his college graduation and the stardom that his blackness paintings earned. I often think of Stella every bit an overnight success. Seeing his work from 1958 together, one realizes that it took him, well, a few months. And no wonder, for the stripes and smears of irksome color show nothing of the deductive logic or hypnotically stripped-down images that ane expects.

What they practice show is how he found his way. In particular, they trace the symmetries and fields of paint to 2 influences, Marking Rothko and Jasper Johns. One tin imagine Johns flag paintings equally seen through Rothko'south abstruse, painterly eyes.

Perhaps more than accurately, i can see them both as if Clement Greenberg had eliminated the "mistakes." The stars have vanished from the flags, and the resultant fields have moved closer to the center. The stripes take spread and deepened to displayed the painter's touch on, and yet every hint of personal meaning has effaced itself. Even when he pulls off some assemblages, after Robert Rauschenberg and Rauschenberg collaborations combine paintings of those years, Stella seems desperate to lend them sufficient gravity.

In short, Stella seems to desire pure painting, but also Johns'due south way of putting icons of Modernism far too close for contemplation of the sublime. And in a few more months, he gets it. Meanwhile, however, these early paintings brand one aware of another influence, one mayhap more than at home in art today. If the titles refer to New York, the dark parallels brand me think of steel grills drawn downward at dark in an industrial area. Moreover, the loose execution could almost look forward to Bronx and East Hamlet graffiti.

The cheap materials, including oil and enamel, certainly refer dorsum to Jackson Pollock, but likewise to the needs of artists one step off the street themselves. The piece of work shy away from humor, much to their detriment, without gaining the blackness of his breakthrough. Yet one tin almost expect ahead to the exuberance of Stella's more than recent thrust into three dimensions.

Self-criticism without the apology

I say almost, because by 1970, his designs still derive methodically from the frame, but both frame and design spill every which way. Colors leap over one another and beyond an entire room. They tilt sharply in and away from walls. They plough an artist's tools—rulers, protractors, French curves, or die-bandage webs —into total-scale models of laminar menses. Titles after Polish villages and exotic birds hint at their architectural scope, historic ambitions, and messy flight patterns. They offer the commencement hint that his work might defy gravity later all.

Stella went to Princeton, where 1 knows the rules. Greenberg, he learned, had called for painting's "purity" and "self-criticism." Stella, also, wants painting to manifest itself, to go past the unthinking kitsch all around him. Yet, if Greenberg'due south vocabulary sounds like the same Stalinist purges that once eliminated abstract artists, Stella has nothing to confess.

He definitely is non confessing to Minimalism or installation art. Others of his generation follow the logic of a formula and the shape of room. Stella, however, has painting on his mind—contained and in i's face.

Sol LeWitt covers the wall, simply he leaves the execution to assistants. Stella's machines, like the pencil lines visible between the stripes, flaunt their handmade look. LeWitt makes formulas so elaborate that they mistiness the line between logic and anarchy, and other Minimalists wrote of entropy. Stella stays the control freak. Minimalism, like a floor piece by Carl Andre, remains open up to fourth dimension, space, perception, and the viewer's body. When Stella fills a room, he does it with objects and paint.

Stella has lectured on the primacy of painting and its inherent logic. Like Leonardo long agone, he worries about rivalries of the arts. He has criticized the Museum of Modern Fine art, an early supporter, for losing its direction. As if in reply, the Modern placed him at a critical bespeak in its survey of the twentieth century. As with the other bang-up exponents of shaped canvas, Elizabeth Murray and Charles Hinman, it seemed unsure whether Stella belongs with the present or the past.

Perhaps Stella feels the same mode—and proud of it. Postmodernism teaches that a piece of work's logic, pushed far enough, blows upward its face. Stella suggests something similar about a career. With each pace, he just pushed the envelope a little further. At some indicate, withal, it hardly makes sense to call the paintings literal—or even painting.

Drafting without the tools

Only at what indicate? Stella'south body of work seems full of sharp breaks. Only where?

His logic of the frame keeps going. Eventually, however, frames vanish altogether except as an idea. Peradventure they served as one all along. When protractors and French curves tower over people, art no longer exemplifies its making: it represents. For all his purity, he has much in mutual with Chuck Close's allusions to photographs. For all his loftier civilization, he puts on a bear witness akin to Roy Lichtenstein with his mammoth Brushstrokes.

A series of the late 1990s draws its titles from Moby Dick. Earlier, Stella exhausted the vocabulary of drafting tools. Hither he creates an album of painting technique. He draws in paint, drips it, and layers it with care. He slathers information technology on and etches it away. The great whale looks anything but white, and Stella has no one left to struggle with only himself.

Even the titles confute Stella's infamous maxim, "what yous run across is what yous see." A book about the series assures ane of a lucifer betwixt episodes in the novel and the paintings. Not that I can spot the links between text and image. For that matter, I tin inappreciably keep the images separate. Then again, I hardly know which about undermines literalism, a narrative or its failure. Either way, art has a dangerous way of multiplying signs.

The artist pays a price, nonetheless. I do not mean his stubbornness. I do not mean his fall into the chasm between former-fashioned painting and new-fangled installation. In 2001, his dealer borrowed an side by side warehouse to display such extravagantly large paintings. I could inappreciably tear myself away from examining each piece up close for all their variations in surface and space. A month later on, still, I could no longer picture so much equally a single painting.

Equally usual, if I take questions, Stella has answers, only non necessarily to what a mere critic might ask. In 2003 and 2005, he over again exceeds his own limits. Both times, he takes over his dealer's regular space, including half the office. He exceeds the limits in another way, likewise. In these paintings, the pigment vanishes.

Painting without the paint

Some hang from the ceiling. They look massive, merely they rotate at the slightest affect. Others projection so far off the wall that one can get behind them. He may not call them sculpture, whatever more Judy Pfaff with her own untamed painting, just they definitely get around. Surprisingly, it leads to Stella'south nigh memorable work in years. Along with the paint, he seems to have stripped away layer upon layer of old habits and dusty ideas.

The shift in 2003 returns him to his Minimalist roots. Ane tin can spot the recurring elements—the rods, the coils, and the mesh—that define this series. One tin can see again the image and object. They face the viewer in one case more than, eye to eye, even in the round. Ane work, I could swear, looks like a helmet. For the commencement time since Stella's exotic birds, I can see lightness and a connection to life, befitting a series named later on bamboo.

Information technology also points back farther, to Modernism. Coils propose a rearing animal from Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and the helmet makes me think of Constantin Brancusi. The exposed, jagged edges, bare metal, and open forms suggest Woman with Her Throat Cut, by Alberto Giacometti. Talk about fine art'due south cutting border. The used engine parts propose Marcel Duchamp and his machine imagery. Then again, the whole impulse to strip abroad old layers sounds like the avant-garde.

Information technology points forward, too, withal, to postmodern delight in illusion. Did that former, shredded metal really once serve as a lamp shade? The forms have a cartoon life of their own, rising out of their cages. I wanted to rescue the lamp shade, to feel the bamboo, and to pet the animals. I wanted to touch the aluminum's raw edges. Giacometti's horror seemed far away.

Not that the story promises to end any time shortly. For at least one moment during the 2005 exhibition, I was fix once again to take Stella as that tired, overblown institution that even the Museum of Mod Fine art started largely to ignore. Once again I saw, if that word makes whatever sense for something so expansive, his impossibly crude-hewed painted metal constructions. And again I wondered what had happened.

Almost flat compared to much of his other contempo piece of work, the 2005 series still earns the name surface, and Stella throws at it everything he has. The artist seems to take traded the iconic stature of his early geometry and the remorseless logic of his increasingly complex constructions for sheer firepower. Who cares these days about iconicity, geometry, logic, or fifty-fifty the future of abstruse art anyway?

Stella meets Spiderman

I should requite him more credit. For Stella to revel in splatter, while pretending to let his shapes govern the assembly, sets up a logical conundrum already. For him to suggest Abstract Expressionism has some well-considered irony, too. Likewise, the work's deliberate crustiness may get in the most, if non just truly gimmicky work in the show. I could almost imagine it in "Greater New York" alongside Kristin Baker'due south acrylic on PVC.

Still, I found myself admiring more the unpainted piece of work that otherwise fills the gallery. Partly, as with Stella's 2003 show, I still prefer the paradox of painting's logician driven by his own logic to abandon paint. Partly, too, I capeesh almost a recovery of modesty afterwards the factory parts, sheer multifariousness of painted surfaces, and references to Moby Dick characteristic of the 1990s. He seems to concede that his chase for the cracking white whale has become an impossible obsession. And so again, one should never charge Stella of lacking self-sensation.

Mostly, however, I simply liked the pieces as sculpture and equally objects that had non really given up on colour at all. Largely simpler in outline than in 2003, their coils typically spiral up around a central centrality, like some kind of electrical automobile working to its own ends. Possibly Doctor Ock created it subsequently losing out to Spiderman.

Forth with metal that does reflect light and color, they contain for contrast gently curving sheets of carbon fiber, less similar airplane parts than oversized bicycle sheets. When I saw Nancy Rubins at Kasmin later, I thought of a Stella imitator with the wit to make works that seemingly had to be held down. These float upward.

Could I still explain to an artist now how Stella once got to speak for painting? Could I explain it to myself? Perhaps I should ask instead why anyone would bother.

Surrealism's threat has gone. Fine art and civilisation withal have a funny fashion of taking over from humanity. At last, however, humans will non mind one bit.

The morning papers

Before 1920, another artist adult a twin obsession with messiness and command. And he, too, makes it tough to tell the two apart. In 1919 Kurt Schwitters cutting four messages from an advertizing, for use in a collage. The syllable stuck with him for the rest of his career.

Schwitters did not title every piece of work Merz. The term became him still. At times he even took it as a middle name. Information technology holds together what Ubu Gallery calls "Paintings, Drawings, Objects, Ephemera." I might well add together poems, cutouts of woods, and the seeming permanence of memory. As with Stella'south career, who can say where one leaves off and the next begins?

For starters, Merz means a fragment of the world, in ii dimensions. Equally in abstraction right down to Stella, each object, each pencil stroke, and each touch of paint stands on its ain. These fragments he has shorn against his ruin, and i lingers a long fourth dimension over their gentle browns and fragile textures.

Merz too takes on the real world, betwixt the disasters of Earth State of war I and the Cracking Low. Role of a company proper noun, "Commerz- und Handelsbank," it accepts the anonymity of advertising, printing, mass reproduction, and corporate power. It accepts the aging and disuse of these tarnished rituals, along with the dirt and broken wire left over from war. For all his care, Schwitters does non allow an like shooting fish in a barrel escape into fine art.

Merz also amounts to type on newspaper, a sign without a signified, an artist'due south book without prototype or story. Schwitters experimented with repeated strings of typewriting as poetry. Conversely, the constructions could pass for real papers, the material backside a withal life. I think of each piece of work as a tray, like an in-box today. Schwitters, were he live, could present it each morning to a German man of affairs. I assume, of course, that a proper bourgeois could discover his way past the 59th Street Span and squeeze down Ubu's new winding stairs.

Then, too, Merz makes no sense at all, and its very nonsense leaves room one time more than for play. His newsprint rarely spells out political points or puns. German Expressionism and Dada knew herz and schmertz, heart and hurting, all also well. In place of their pessimism, Schwitters evokes their sounds as a comforting platitude, similar moon and June. Life goes on somehow, and so, after all, does painting.

Fits and starts

Stella might agree with that, were he to pass up the volume for a infinitesimal. But then, for both artists, just going on can involve tantalizing fits and starts.

Stella's logic takes painting on an unlikely path to Postmodernism. Kurt Schwitters dedicates Dada to tradition. I savored the woody tones—and sometimes wood itself—lacking in Stella'south bamboo. Collage never has to give up the handmade, because it begins equally art.

Opposites may concenter, or they tin can cross in the night. I left thinking of what the two artists accept in common. Consider their different inheritance from Modernism—and from the founder of collage itself.

Pablo Picasso borrows the feel of crumpled paper to stand for a chapeau. His fragments tend to avoid the frame, as if they have no idea what to do without 1 another. Casting ideas and representations against i another, Schwitters lets paper wait like paper, fifty-fifty as its edges fade into pigment or cross the frame. Schwitters, like Stella, appreciates each thing for itself.

Cubism separates the texture, shape, proper name, and sound of a violin. Information technology unsettles any thought or point of view. Schwitters starts with a single vision, like a even so life seen from in a higher place. Then he turns it ninety degrees, upwardly on the wall. Facing the viewer, information technology looks equally frontal as Stella's protractors—and as hard to face.

The more Stella or Schwitters lets a medium speak for itself, the harder it gets to know who is speaking. Perhaps Modernism understood this all along. "Is the existence of limits serving to distinguish betwixt the various arts likewise a condition of the possibility of value within them?" Greenberg meant that every bit a rhetorical question, a affair of ethical and cultural as well as esthetic values. Once an artist poses questions, still, art has a fashion of taking them literally.

A postscript: two villages

Y'all can imagine the story. When her boyfriend landed in jail, she felt doubly cheated. Somehow, he had gone from neurotic to institutionalized without passing through full-blown hallucinations. One could experience the aforementioned fashion nearly "Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture." How could Frank Stella make the transition so effortlessly without commencement producing sculpture?

As Stella saw it, he never needed sculpture. Painting creates, even demands, its own infinite. Information technology does not need recourse to illusion or to sculpture, merely information technology still might need some help. Over the years, aid has ranged from shaped canvas and tilted planes to twisted and welded metal covered in a library of painting techniques—or in nothing at all. Stella's earlier stripes assistance, too, by running parallel to the frame, in black and industrial hues that elevator them further into the room. Bare sail and pencil lines visible between the stripes insist on the object and its making, and so does the woods of the stretcher, prepare thick dimension out.

Stella's industrial materials give new meaning to the discussion machine, once practical to large academic painting. They take too fabricated painting's onetime savior into something of an establishment. Could they make him an architect too? In this exhibition, he has aspired to i for almost forty years. The Met surrounds recent architectural models with painting from as early as his 1971 Polish Villages. When he alluded to communities destroyed by conquest and war, could he already take envisioned a cure?

Like an architect and dissimilar many a Minimalist, Stella shapes a space autonomously from the work's surroundings. His freely curving metal can even approach Frank Gehry'southward exteriors of the aforementioned years. So does its ability to guide one forth surprisingly well defined paths. His choice of projects plays to that force, with a rambling park, an auditorium, and split-level housing. They provide designs for living and animate, non for sitting and working. Younger artists may think of him as corporate, but I cannot yet imagine him tackling an role circuitous.

A comparison to Gehry, even so, overlooks that continuity in his career. Like his abstruse painting, Stella's architecture reverses one modernist ideology, class follows function. For Stella, form guides every twist and plough, to the bespeak of creating its own function. It creates and connects spaces for strolling and for shelter. Past dissimilarity, postmodern compages highlights a disconnect, as with the embellishments of Michael Graves. Stella has criticized Gehry's Guggenheim Balboa for non fully serving the art inside.

However, no one is rushing to build a Stella village, because at heart he is all the same painting. On the roof of the Met, he does contribute this summer's sculpture, but the curves look lovelier in the paintings and models downstairs. With each gallery evidence, he grows toward his nearly sculptural painting still. Even so for all the three-dimensional drama of his hulking, curving painted metal in 2003, form nevertheless ruled, right down to quotes from blueprint templates. In his 2005 show, the unpainted surfaces rose upwardly on their own, almost like robotic life. Maybe his piece of work should never get sculpture or architecture, because then information technology will have to sit notwithstanding.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Frank Stella's "Bamboo" series ran through June 18, 2003, at Paul Kasmin and, ii years later, his "Balinese Grapheme" series ran through May 14, 2005. His 1958 paintings ran at Harvard'southward Arthur One thousand. Sackler Museum through May 7, 2006. "Paintings, Drawings, Objects, Ephemera" by Kurt Schwitters ran through May 23, 2003, at Ubu. "Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 28, 2007, in conjunction with rooftop sculpture, while smaller work ran at Kasmin through July 6. For associations with the German language linguistic communication, I owe a debt to Martin Herbach. Naturally he bears no responsibility for how I take abused his thoughtful hints. A related review takes up a Stella retrospective.

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Source: https://www.haberarts.com/schwitt.htm

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