-continued from part 2
Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s most recent body of work perhaps skirts closest to boredom or misunderstanding, and one senses she is quite happy for that to be the case.
Her
paintings of trees risk coming off as the work of a painter playing it safe in
their dotage, yet they are bold and compelling in part precisely because of
this risk.
In
fact, they embrace and extend her earlier work- her interest in the array of
close tones in the leaves that fill the frame, for example, stretches all the
way back to the play of close tones in her stained floorboards from the late
1960’s. Indeed, Mangold sticks to her guns- the tree paintings absolutely
continue her investigation of intent observation vs. what I’ve termed de-centred
‘ambience’.
It’s
an odd combination which is at once very 1970’s (again, with some ties to dead
pan photography), but which also has precedent in two very singular painters
working in the latter 18th century- Francis Towne and Thomas Jones.
<<<<<<
The
Welsh painter Thomas Jones had a modestly successful career for a time,
painting conventional landscapes in the style of his tutor Richard Wilson, yet
his reputation grew exponentially in the 20th century when small
studies from his (six year) Italian painting trip were uncovered. Never
intended for public exhibition, the small works (mostly oil on primed paper)
are daringly progressive in their composition (they anticipate the effects of
snapshot photography and their assimilation into painting by decades). Painted
as Neo-Classicism was just segueing into Romanticism, they anticipate many
artistic concerns of the next two centuries.
A
perennial subject of Jones’ in this period is a blank façade- whether viewed
daringly close to the ‘viewer’, as if from the window of a facing building, or
simply filling the frame. They play with grids of rectangles, with abstract
bands of wall and sky, with extreme cropping; they anticipate qualities in
minimalism, surrealism, the Barbizon school, the ‘accidental’ compositions of
Degas, even Baldessari’s Every building
on Sunset Strip.
And-
with their ‘flat’ subject, their large, practically (for the time) featureless
passages given the barest of contextualizing details, their disorientation of
scale and elevation- they deal with many of the subjects and strategies that
have continued through Mangold’s career.
There
is a distinctly de-centred quality to them, a sense that everything in the
picture is as much the subject, that the totality of the picture and its
conception of the world is the point, that all points of the picture are put
forward for our attention (in A Wall in
Naples, the three hanging rags recreate the elements of the composition in
microcosm) which aligns it with the modernity that would lead to Eno’s
objectively ambient composition. They bypass the picture-making conventions of
the day by essentially eliminating (moral, spiritual, narrative) interest. What
significance there is to be taken is only that which we can give, what we are
free to give (how we might unravel the metaphorical significance of the blank
windows, the weathered and ‘worked’ surfaces of the walls, for example). The
painting of Virgil’s tomb from the introduction to this text excludes all
reference to the place’s wider significance, and yet flips back on itself to find
a subject within the objective facts; that a tomb is an absence around which
the lives of the living go on turning; that the absence of death is experienced
almost as a presence, a negative presence; that there is an unknowable hole at
the centre of things; any or none of these things are explored in its curious
state of late noon sunshine, that hovers between matter-of-factness and
existential dread (Hitchcock’s Vertigo, also
objective-yet woozy, has this atmosphere). It’s the same
kind of reflexive selection-by-rejection approach to ‘meaning’ and significance
that goes on in Mangold’s work- whereby an empty floor becomes something stared
at, and, like the painting itself, is a helpfully ‘quiet’ screen on which to
project.
If
Jones is ‘ambient’, by any stretch, it’s the more uneasy ambiance of Eno’s
later Ambient 4: On Land- in which he
explored a deep bed of dissonance and disturbance below the pastoral prettiness
of the surface. Mangold certainly tends to keep the darker thoughts in the
distance, but they are there if you go looking (certainly there are further
implications to the obsessively clean floors, the compulsive taping and
measuring.)
Returning
to the introduction, our other painter is a less radical yet still interesting
figure. Francis Towne, unlike Jones, does choose to include incidental
‘interest’ in his picture of the tomb- particularly the small figures of the
tourists. Yet they remain distant, dwarfed by the surroundings. What’s perhaps
more startling is the visual style- graphic to the point of being
illustrational in a very 20th century way. Indeed, though he was
relatively well-known in his time, Towne was rejected by the Royal Academy 11
times, was neglected for many years after his death, and was only ‘rediscovered’
by Paul Oppé in 1916, when claims were made about his having anticipating the
‘flatness’ and abstraction of the day.
There’s
ultimately little ‘meaning’ in Towne’s work- trained as a decorative coach
painter, he often seems to be invested purely in pleasure and elegance as ends
in themselves. They speak neither of intellectualism (classical ruins are just
there, and pretty, rather than having any grander significance about the rise
and fall of civilisations), nor do they really have any proto-romantic
moodiness or emotional sweep. Rather, they have the same kind of blank, melancholic
stillness of Peter Schmidt’s holiday watercolours- the peculiar objectivity of
being within and floating outside of the world, the sense of travel through it
providing moments of tranquil beauty, if not any greater sense of perspective.
Perhaps
he was a great stylist in search of something more- or perhaps there was a
consciousness on his part that the world just often is, and that there’s something to be said for merely putting a
frame around it.
The
‘look’ of Towne’s watercolours is also extremely 1970’s- they almost recall the
fine-line artwork in the bandes dessinées comic books of artists like
Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, or the prog-rock album covers of Roger Dean (though
these examples lean more to the fantastical). Across Towne’s pictures are the
same kinds of mood and atmosphere as we’ve seen in Mangold, Schmidt, Jones
etc.- of looking out one’s room in the late noon, the early morning, the early
evening; times of possibility, action or inaction, between waking and
day-dreaming, passing the time. A sharp kind of lucid haziness.
Sylvia
Mangold has always maintained a practice of making watercolours, yet the tree
paintings in oil go some way towards having a kind of watercolour ‘look’, with
their lightness and luminosity, their (well-hidden but crucial) provisionality.
As
much as it carries the notion of dilettantism, watercolour also has
associations with other kinds of non-art image making. Mangold’s work also has
connotations of 18th century landscape painting in which the
activity was somewhat just as much aligned with
pseudo-archaeological/topographical practices of recording and rendering as it
was with notions of art or expression (Mangold’s trees include tiny notes of
month and time of day- 08’, 5pm etc.). This kind of empirical aesthetic, of
pseudo-scientific/mathematic fact-gathering, is also in the patterns of tiles,
the rulers and tapes, but always with the further philosophical implications of
trying to get at the structure of things, the philosophical implications of
measuring, squaring up, of horizons and vanishing points (obvious ancestors to
her trees are Cezanne, a very formative influence, and Mondrian).
There
is something in the fusion of lightness and precision in her trees that just
feels like 18th century tree studies. Never falling back on a
convenient shorthand for ‘leaf, ‘branch’, ‘foliage’ they are quite hauntingly
rendered in their totality and diversity.
The
trees feel animated in the way that Towne’s watercolours can also look like
stills from animation. There’s a sense in Towne’s flatness of shifting masses
of colour, of interlocking units of light and shadow, that our understanding of
the world is partial, that as grounded as everything can seem it can just as
easily shift and reconfigure itself like a passing cloud (perhaps this is where
the ‘meaning’ in his work is to be found).
There
is something analytic to both Mangold and Towne, a sense that they are at a
slight remove, trying to get at things and coming up against flatness, the look
of things. Yet for Mangold it’s not a simple process of showing this flatness,
but an attempt to reconcile it with our sense of volume, height, our position
on the ground, our capacity or incapacity for processing complex systems and
details and their relation to greater structures, zoom with wide angle (which
is in turn our position towards the flat canvas).
Still
pretty much ‘easel painting’ in their physical size, they have a grand sense of
scale. Mangold varies the level of cropping into (pretty much) three groups-
top half of tree (more or less sparse, particularly in winter), high mid-point
of tree with confusion of branches and foliage, and close-up of leaves filling
the canvas.
They
often disguise how odd they can be. The group that looks more to the top of the
tree are not in extreme perspective, as if from our position on the ground, but
generate through their cropping the feeling of looking up (she has said she
wants the painting to ‘whoosh up’) yet never being able to take in the whole
thing. Painted from life on the ground, there is an imaginary leap up to the
thick of the treetops. Mangold says ‘going to look HERE’- and we’re there. Like
the floors they are samples, samples of our feeling of what tree-ness is,
looped and reverberated. They internalize our sense of specific height,
gravity, opacity and transparency- all the things that add up to our sense of
trees as things.
And,
similarly to the floors, the trees are a discreet subject. Or they are made
discreet by their ambient composition, the way they fill the frame (they bring
to mind Constable sky studies). They are easy to pass by on a gallery wall- yet
they combine cumulatively to something meditative, something powerfully open
and committed, and strangely timeless (Mangold is 80).
The pictures mistrust, yet
co-opt, the very idea of edges and limits. For Mangold, the knowability of the
world is not to be measured out in rulers, but encountered as a centreless mass
of interacting data (Hume’s ‘bundle of perceptions’) of which we are part and
with which we must also, necessarily, interact. The world always spills over
her edges, in paintings which assert their own limits while vaulting over them.
Even within the picture there is
still a sense of incompleteness the longer one looks at them, despite their
seeming very much finished on initial viewing. The trees are discreetly
artificial, abstracted, all the more discreet because they seem so convincingly
observed, objectively composed. The amount of air, un-fussiness, fussiness,
busyness, un-busyness, simplification, complexification etc. in them is always
surprising, always well hidden.
In these pictures of dense foliage
or intersecting branches, she again comes back to that 70’s ambient approach towards
interest/attention. Dense and yet dispersed, they skirt the edges of boredom
while never becoming boring. One’s attention gets caught up in the slight
shifts and angles (which avoid the mildly hectoring tone of Cezanne, who
constantly asserts that this is what
should be happening with one’s attention), a ‘looking’ that is capable of being
intent while looping, floating, drifting. There is an ebb and flow of
attention, a mark or hue changes its role or function across the play of the
image- a shadow here becomes a recession there, a gathered ridge of white paint
defines both the edge of a branch and the light poking through- in the way that
ambient tape loops phase shift, with the eye/ear flexing from one focus to the
other. What is foreground or background shifts, what is surface, subject,
melody, support; what is happening in the object and what is happening to one’s
‘mood’...
In the tree pictures Mangold
fills the frame with an over-profusion of detail. While minimalism in the
visual arts was very literally about making minimal gestures and objects, what
was termed ‘minimalism’ within music was often about intricate profusion, dizzying
repetition and layering as a result of simple compositional procedures and
systems (as we’ve noted before, it’s Mangold’s inputs and variables which are
‘minimal’, not necessarily her results).
Mangold’s simple setup- paint the
tree, fill the picture with the tree- is made complex in the doing, having to
paint from life, having to be receptive and reactive rather than rationally
dictatorial (a mode of receptivity that carries through for the viewer).
When Pauline Oliveros was
criticised in the music press for apparently failing to ‘compose’ her pieces,
it was to miss that she was part of a radical reassessment of what it might
mean to ‘compose’ at all- to be a composer rather than an initiator, a reactor,
an improvisor. A suggester. As she explained-
The design of how [the electronic
pieces] would come into existence was what I mapped, not the content at
all...It was a kind of performance architecture using tape machines and
understanding certain operations in the circuitry which was non-linear...I
didn’t have time to think about it in rational terms, but had to act in the
moment.
For Mangold this is most evident
in the tree paintings, her most overtly ‘painterly’ works, in which she is reactive
to the haptic, the material, the physical things taking place within her
‘performance architecture’. She is alive to the shifting network of relations
between the sub and superstructure of her pictures, hardwired into the
circuitry of physical-material creative decision making (and so it’s a
different kind of ‘composing’). It’s
not so much that she’s painting from life that is unique- of course- more that
she’s applying that technique to something all-encompassing, to the demanding
structure of working right to the edges of the canvas without ending up
inelegantly incomprehensible, that the picture doesn’t end up in visual din,
that it remains ‘quiet’ but still absorbing, that it doesn’t suffocate. That
she is ‘alive’ in this situation comes through in the picture and for the
viewer, whose receptivity is similarly engaged (and who follows Mangold as the
structure of the tree/picture emerges).
It’s not the old hierarchy of
composer-performer-audience (which Eno has said he wanted to dismantle), but a
more flattened structure (or ecology) of co-exploration, in which the viewer’s
attention and receptivity towards minimal, subtle, infinitely and
infinitesimally variable differences within and between the works must
necessarily mirror that of the maker. When such an approach works, or is made
to resolve itself, both artist and audience are equally and pleasantly
surprised and delighted by the results.
IIIII
With these notions of suggestion
rather than assertion, of the flattened hierarchies of author and audience, I
shall hold off making any final remarks. Instead please find the following set
of open-ended instructions/suggestions from Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies deck- perhaps
they will provide further means of approaching the oblique pictorial strategies
employed by the ambient painter/re-shuffler Sylvia Plimack Mangold:
Define an area as 'safe' and use it as
an anchor
Ask your body
Do nothing for as long as possible
Don't be frightened of cliches
Go slowly all the way round the
outside
Is it finished?
Honour
thy error as a hidden intention
Don't stress one thing more than
another
Simple subtraction
Do something boring
Infinitesimal gradations
Make a blank valuable by putting it in
an exquisite frame
Don't be frightened to display your
talents
Make an exhaustive list of everything
you might do and do the last thing on the list
Repetition is a form of change
Idiot glee (?)
Question the heroic approach
Use fewer notes
Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do
The tape is now the music
Convert a melodic element into a
rhythmic element
Feed the recording back out of the medium
Trust in the you of now
Give the game away
What is the reality of the situation?
Don't stress *on* thing more than another
In total darkness, or in a very large
room, very quietly
Fill every beat with something
Don't be frightened to display your
talents
Work at a different speed
From nothing to more than nothing
Go outside. Shut the door.
...
