Ken Greenleaf
The Metaphysics of Abstraction
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“In art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can’t explain.”
— Georges Braque
I’m defining metaphysics here as a level of human apprehension that is beyond that which we can arrive at rationally. It's a simple view, one that I approach though personal experience rather than scholarly or academic expertise. This is not an Artforum- or even Documenta-based theory set. I have no thesis to elucidate with my work nor do I have an expectation that my work is open, at its most essential, to a meaningful verbal analysis. I may or may not be a good thinker, but I've been doing this a long time through some difficult spiritual and even existential crises. I know what I want my work to do, and I’ve learned that through experience.
By spiritual I do not mean religious, but rather that sense that everyone's daily experience is filtered through an overriding and mysterious, possibly unconscious set of attitudes. A Roman Catholic priest once told me that his theological studies, boiled down to one idea: The difference between the fires of hell and the beatific vision is a matter of attitude. He meant that our view of reality is subjective and our reaction can change. I can love or hate what is happening to me – I have a choice. Extreme circumstances can make that choice very difficult, and I am fully aware that all the people in this room have more experience with extreme circumstances than I. That is part of why I am here.
But the basic premise remains – our interior lives, how we see and experience the world can be affected. Our awareness is subject to change.
I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say since I suggested the topics to Serge months ago. This talk is about art, though I’ve taken a while to get to it. Last August I put up a show of my work in a gallery, and at the opening I was taken by the arm by and walked through the show by the editor of a design magazine. She saw small colored shapes in the middle of a piece of paper and I think she wanted me give her an analysis of how the choices were made. I could not, to her satisfaction. But a week or so later it came to me what I wish I had said: many artists work so that you, the audience, will think well of them, the artist. At this point in my life I try to make work that will make you think well not of me, but of yourself.
I can’t tell you anything or teach you anything, but if you see what I have made, really see it, it is my hope that your day will to some small degree be changed. I don’t care if you like me or not (well, I do, but not as far as my work is concerned), but I do want to make something that will affect your outlook in some concrete way. My goal is, for however short a period of time, to induce a deep level of engagement with something other than your own internal dialog. Not thinking of me as much as thinking with me. Properly done I should nearly disappear, leaving just you and the work and however you feel when looking at it.
I look to three historical artists the most – Cézanne, Matisse and Malevich. There are plenty of artists throughout history whose work I love and admire, and many working today that I care about. But it’s these three that are compass direction toward what I aspire to accomplish, however imperfectly.
I’d like to discuss what I learned from each of them and how it applies to my own view of art as an enterprise. A real art historian might take issue with what I say, but that’s not the point. I can’t, and won’t try, to say what is true for others. These ideas may have resonance for artistic practice in general, but others in this business may care about other things.
I would also point out that I don’t speak in detail about artists unless I haves seen their work in person, sometimes, like the ‘Red Studio’ or ‘The Piano Lesson’, many times over the years. In New York works by Matisse and Cézanne are easy to see, Malevich harder, but not impossible.
First, Cézanne, whom Matisse called the father of us all. More than any other artist before him, Cézanne knew instinctively that the final product of what he was doing was about him, not about his subject. The painting stood as itself, absent any function or need as a narrative or rendering. It was not a description of, say, apples. Cézanne can be very difficult – it took me years to learn to see some of his ‘card player’ paintings because they are so odd, but I finally saw a group of them a couple of years ago and knew his reason for putting that card-player’s hat in such a funny spot was inevitable. It was better than realistic, it was true.
When people write about Cézanne’s apples as depicting the essence of apples, they are only partly right. Cézanne’s apples are the essence of apples to him. I believe his commitment to what he was doing grew over the years, he probably started the same way everyone does. He was insecure about his work his whole life, but deep down I think he knew what he was doing.
And that was nothing less than changing the world, saving painting from its slavery to documentation. His ideas became the foundation for everything that came after. Cézanne was the first real abstract artist, in that his subjects were himself and the thing that he had made. We can see that more easily in hindsight, but the basic, self-referential tenets of modernist thought were all laid out in his work.
I don’t care about any artist’s process. That said, I learned from a couple of sources how Matisse worked, and what he was looking for, and it has meant a lot to me personally. Many of his greatest works were painted over and over until he got it right. He would change the slightest thing, starting, say, with a realistic drawing of a head and then reworking it again and again until it had the kind of resonance he felt he needed. He accepted that he usually couldn’t do it the first time, and knew if he stopped at the early stages his work would not be what he wished it to be.
We can rightly ask what his criteria were, but that’s a question we can’t really answer. That lies in a transcendent set of experiential sensations. As abstract as that idea is, and as indefinable as those sensations are, Matisse knew they were real.
Most artists, in my experience, give up too soon. Something gets made, seems right and is declared to be finished. This is a problem with all art, but it’s acute in abstract art since it has no objective correlatives. When I was young I trusted my talent and thought I had ability, and maybe I did. But it’s not enough. There are photographs and other accounts that show how demanding Matisse was for his work. Paintings like ‘The Dance’ and ‘The Piano Lesson’ were worked and reworked until they looked as if they had been improvised in a state of grace.
Cézanne and Matisse and many others artists, some very wonderful, needed the foundation of a subject, even thought their work was deeply and wonderfully abstract conceptually. Art comes from art, and it was what they had been trained to do and the reason they had started doing it in the first place. The next logical step was not one they wished to take.
I’ve seen far fewer Malevich paintings at first hand than Cézannes or Matisses. Opportunities to see major works were, when I lived in New York, fairly rare, except for shows. Yet the quality of his One Big Idea is so pervasive and compelling that by itself it has acquired a universal status, at least for me. It’s nearly impossible to recreate the historical and mental atmosphere that brought him to his ideas of the ultimate in abstraction, the spiritual and perceptual non-objectivity that he claimed would purifying art. It may well be that the idea of tossing out the ballast of art came before the square, but I’m inclined to doubt it. I believe personally that he worked is way to it in the studio, but really doesn’t, in my opinion, matter whether the work drove his thinking or the other way around.
There’s an undercurrent of 19th-century progressivism in even the idea that we had come to the conclusion of a long line of conceptual progress toward a highest form. It is if there were a great chain of being, like those posited by pre-Darwinian biologists, that the whole of biology was to produce Modern Man. That thinking was in the air in those days, as was revolution and the creation of a new, utopian world.
But me that’s a tough and unfruitful way to think about it. Frankly, I think that Malevich is no closer to the essence of necessary human awareness than the artists of Chauvet. But we, and I, learned something critically important from him – that there was a function of art that we knew and yet didn’t know, and that has profound and fundamental meaning.
We do not need representation. That’s what we learned. It’s a commonplace now, a hundred years later, but it wasn’t then. He knew that he had reached something bigger than himself, something that reached beyond the mundane, and I honor him for it. The world did change. Based on what he discovered (not invented) we can be confident in our ability go see beyond the surface things. None of this is new. What is new, or was, is that art’s function runs much broader and deeper than was thought before him. That ability of art was always there, but it was attached to a subject, an image. Now we know that the art is the subject.
