|
|
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
|
NUANCE AND INTENSITY IN SEAN SCULLY: Humanism in abstract
disguise
This is one reason why Scully is not a Greenbergian purist, although his works are inherently ‘self-critical’, as I will argue, and thus alter the modernist tradition while extending it. They reveal the unresolvable conflict between the determinate and indeterminate — what Greenberg called the literal order of effects and the preconscious and unconscious or expressive order of effects — that is at its core. Greenberg thought that a painting’s physical presence was more important than its spiritual presence — that the ‘art’ in art had to do with the artist’s critical response to the material facts of the medium. The Old Masters’ spirituality and humanism, Greenberg argued, was an extraneous imposition on their mastery of the medium. But Scully shows that unless such a response is motivated by expressive concerns — unless it involves an attempt to articulate the inward processes of human life through the material medium — the result is a mechanical, aesthetically empty, ‘uncritical’ art, like the spiritless post-painterly abstraction Greenberg ended his career advocating. Scully is a humanist Old Master in abstract disguise. His paintings have the spiritual depth and universal import of the best Old Master paintings, distilled and coded in modernist abstract terms. In Scully spiritual experience is conveyed through nuance and intensity rather than through iconography and imagery — and with greater effect. For where traditional art mediates spiritual meaning through cultural symbols, so that it becomes more of a learned communication than a lived experience, Scully gives it direct perceptual life, so that it becomes an intensely lived meaning. It loses its dogmatic character and becomes a nuanced process. In much traditional painting the paradox of the best abstract painting is that it gives spiritual immediacy to what is a dead academism. Paradoxically, spirit is no longer an abstract concept in abstract painting, but a concrete sense experience. Scully’s colours lap against and even overlap the boundaries of the geometrical forms that contain them, as though reluctant to accept limitation and procrustean confinement. The boundaries blur — no hard edge for Scully — but they never entirely dissolve. One might say the passionate colour of immanent desire meets the intellectual resistance of transcendent geometry, resulting in an uneasy balance of forces, a nervous self-containment and a sense of unfinished, burdensome emotional business. What heightens the maximalist effect — the sense of expressive resonance generated by the paint process — and adds to the inwardness of the paintings, is the fact that the modules are not neatly arranged in rows (rarely more than short bursts of repetition) but rather seem discombobulated, even ‘shaken’ and disarranged (even perpetually rearranged, as though some puzzle to be solved) as their (painterly) ‘edginess’ suggests. Thus we have the sense of disequilibration within equilibrium — an especially uncanny version of what Mondrian called ‘dynamic equilibrium’. We sense the disarrangement in the arrangement, or rather a perpetual process of rearrangement, as though some unsolvable (emotional) problem had to be solved, resulting in a painting that is a conundrum, a geometrical Gordian knot, as it were. Scully’s paintings are cryptically individual, however universal their geometry. Indeed, it is as though the geometry is individuated and experienced through the colour, oddly humanising it. The rupturing of the grid makes the work all too human, and the moody colour makes it enigmatically personal. The colour seems to imbue the geometry with inner life, humanising it without denying its sublimity. However ingeniously harmonious, Scully’s paintings seem oddly discordant, as though suffering from self-doubt — an unhappiness that makes them seem vulnerable for all the colourful ‘forwardness’ of the units of the planar grid. It is though they were not sure that they had delivered the happiness that art promises, as Stendhal believed. Scully may be what Lawrence Alloway called a systemic painter,1 but his system seems unsettled and agitated — not yet petrified into simplistic clarity and calm. Thus Scully escapes the easy self-evidence and expressive emptiness — tautological complacency and emotional bankruptcy — of so much minimalist work. The tendency to entropy, implicit in the homogeneity of the grid,2 is undermined by an elusive sense of expressive force, making for a sense of uncertainty bordering on uncontrollability. Scully builds his structures, but they tend to suggest the unstructured. In Scully’s paintings non-identity violates geometrical self-identity while existing within it. This is why they are ‘self-critical’. Scully’s abstract paintings restore, and in the process recapitulate and epitomise, on a new level of self-consciousness, what Kandinsky called ‘the Great Abstraction’ and Mondrian termed ‘Abstract-Real painting’. Scully renews its radicality and authenticity, liberating it from the academic cliché it had become. He renews the sense of discovery that drove the pioneers of abstraction, thus making aesthetic fundamentals once again fresh. Aesthetic mysticism,3 and the painting that has often been its vehicle — painting with what Ad Reinhardt called ‘a formal, hierartic, grand manner’,4 which is Scully’s kind of painting — have lost relevance, even validity in a world of techno-conceptualism and message-oriented art, not to say popular culture. Moreover, passion is unfashionable — certainly compared to irony, with its devious intellectuality (although there is playful irony as well as intellectual mischievousness in Scully’s ingenious ‘disarrangements’) — and his paintings are passionate and ‘instinctive’. Caspar David Friedrich, van Gogh, Matisse and Rothko — all romantics, for whom art is ‘a mode of feeling’ rather than a matter of ‘subject’ or ’exact truth’, as Baudelaire said — are Scully’s touchstones, as he acknowledges.5 Romanticism reaches a certain climax in high abstraction: ‘That “artistic” element which has here been reduced to a minimum must be recognised as the most powerfully affective abstract element.’6 Scully’s colour blocks are such affective abstract elements. He finds them in the everyday world, as his photographs of buildings indicate, and he uses them in detached form in his paintings, where they become spiritually expressive. Mondrian wrote of Abstract-Real painting that if ’equilibrium and therefore unity are to exist in life, the spiritual must be manifested determinately and the natural must be interiorised so deeply that it reveals its pure essence’7. Colour is the perceptual essence of the natural, geometry the determinate form of the spiritual (as Plato thought). In Scully they interpenetrate, unchanging geometry lending changing colour a certain conceptual solidity, moving colour lending unmoving geometry a certain perceptual naturalness (‘presentational immediacy’, to use Alfred North Whitehead’s term).8 Like Mondrian, Scully seems determined to show that ‘human duality can evolve- to unity’.9 ‘The New Plastic cannot express rigid intellectuality’, Mondrian insisted, for it ‘arises through the soul’, and is ‘coloured by the qualities of the soul’. ‘Universal thought [is] animated and experienced through the soul, and thus transformed to the expression of emotion.’ ‘The New Plastic’, Mondrian argued, ‘is the expression of a matured, conscious sense of unity which forms the basis of a new consciousness’. Scully agrees, but suggests that the process of reaching spiritual maturity and achieving higher consciousness is ongoing and inconclusive. He shows the process of evolution to unity, but never arrives at unity, conveying the incompleteness of the evolution, indeed implying that it can never be completed — a serious difference with Mondrian. For Scully, there is trouble in Mondrian’s paradise of geometry. His colours — which no doubt would be too moody (‘impure’) for Mondrian, and thus regressively ‘soulful’ — suggest as much. In fact, if the ‘pure relationships of opposites’ crystallise into a stable, ‘classical’ unity (reach the finality of reconciliation) the emotional result would be human stagnancy and pseudo-independence — certainly not what Fromm calls the ‘independence’ of ‘radical humanism’, which involves ‘penetrating through fictions and illusions to a full awareness of reality’.10 This includes awareness of its contradictoriness and thus disillusionment with the fiction of stable unity. We see this disillusionment in the unstable harmony of Scully’s paintings. It is what gives them their independence from the tradition of romantic abstraction to which they belong, for the artists of that tradition find a mysterious unity in disunity, while Scully finds the unavoidable disunity in unity. Thus he restores the tradition to its dialectical roots, liberating it from reification — historical ossification. Romantic abstraction is not another postmodern cliché in Scully’s work, but remains an expression of ‘deepened or spiritual emotional life’,11 indeed the only artistic way of deepening emotional life, and experiencing, in an epiphany that liberates from it — a moment of transcendence — what is universal in it. Wall of light red, Wall of light silver black, Fold I and Pale dog, all 2001, and Falling figure, Mooseurach and Yellow figure, all 2002, are subtly off-square. All embody the idea of a wall — and acknowledge the gallery wall even as they finesse it — and as such acquire architectural stature. Wall of light sky 2002 is a long horizontal wall — an abstract skyscape, as it were — and Sea wall 2002, evokes that bleak yet splendid object, usually made of stone or brick, hol-ding its colourful own against the sea. The pink suggests Homer’s ‘rosy fingers of dawn’, the grey suggests the daily tragedy of dusk. To me, Sea wall is the perfect symbol of the strength and solidity of Scully’s abstract walls, and also the atmospheric vividness and flexibility which adds to their offness. The unsettling offness — inner oddness — of Scully’s ‘constructed paintings’ calls attention to the oddness of the relationship between geometrical ‘figure’ and geometrical ground in them. Even in works in which no isolated figure is set conspicuously against a ground, the geometrical elements that form it function as individual, strangely aloof figures. More crucially, the spatial offness of the paintings draws attention to the oddness of the spaces between the modular elements — the zone of transition between the geometrical blocks. It doesn’t matter whether they are oriented horizontally or vertically, or laid out with grid regularity: the boundary between them — the ‘line’ formed by their edges — tends to be indeterminate. The blocks don’t fit neatly together — their edges don’t exactly meet. Mondrianesque right angles and suprematist squares abound, but their nervous edges give them a fragmented look. Indeed, a Scully painting can be read as a geometrical attempt to reconstruct eternity — to piece together, in an archaeological endeavor, fragments of a lost if not forgotten eternity. This hesitant boundary is an insecure crack in the wall, where the mortar of light holds the bricks together even as it separates them. It suggests that the wall might come tumbling down, but it is the space where nuance and intensity generate — the most spiritual, revelatory, intimate space in the painting, for in it we glimpse the inner life of its universal forms. Scully’s blurred boundary is the spiritual pulse of his painting. In 1965, in his famous essay on ‘Specific objects’, Donald Judd declared that their use of ‘three dimensions’ or ‘real space ... gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colours — which is riddance of the most salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present.’12 Judd also attacked Mondrian’s ‘relational’ painting — painting that depended on the relationship between its planar parts, and tried to construct unity, rather than on the given ‘unity’ of a ‘minimalist’ gestalt — as obsolete and passé. Clearly Scully doesn’t think so — he’s after all a European painter. What Judd neglects to note — what he is suppressing when he suppresses the ‘space in and around marks and colours’, which in a sense is what Scully celebrates and cherishes — is that this is expressive space, the space where the painting comes to expressive life. It is the most nuanced, intense space in Scully’s paintings. Scully’s is what Donald Winnicott has called ’transitional space’ — space that is at once created and found, at once subjective and objective, space that is charged with (what Anton Ehrenzweig calls)13 inarticulate emotion; space in which amorphous, inchoate emotion can be presented in all its amorphousness and inchoateness, that is, without rationalising or conceptualising it. It is the sliver of space in which the doors of perception are opened — the nuance of space in which perception is most intense. ‘An anthropology of the nuance does not stem from a concept but rather from experience of life’, Viktor von Weizsäcker writes. It involves reliance on ‘feeling [rather] than on concepts’, on ‘the imponderables, the impressions which reveal themselves only to the subjective mind’. The ‘dehumanised condition of the concepts’ — Scully’s geometrical forms — ‘has been of service ... since (in accordance with the principle of polarity) it is by virtue of the concepts that the non-conceptual quality of the nuances is made manifest. But the emphasis is still on the elaboration of non-conceptual nuance: that is what matters, that is the most profitable undertaking.’ It is the undertaking of Scully’s paintings. ‘A nuance is always a means of defending a more accurate or better feeling’ — one might say deeper feeling. ‘This longing, defending, penetratively sensitive and humane character of the nuance shows that ... it possesses a vector quantity, a directed force. Nuances can only be correctly grasped by ’nuanced’ receptivity.’15 Viktor von Weizsäcker’s distinction between ’’nuanced’ people’ and ‘the “non-nuanced”’ is the distinction between Scully’s nuanced art and Judd’s increasingly unnuanced — not to say anti-nuanced — art14. ‘Humanity is always disputed’ in the battle between subtly nuanced space and dogmatically given geometry — minimalist geometry. ‘The fact that the nuance has become the spiritual opponent of certain concepts, ideals, absolutisms, dogmas, that it has joined battle with positions of power and dominion is a spiritual reflection of this dispute’, writes von Weizsäcker. ‘By praising the nuance we do not enter into a paradise of peace nor into a house whose occupants live in harmony. The nuance exercises a destructive effect on all absolute ideals, it dulls the cutting edge, blurs the borders, relativises antitheses, ruins schematic organizations.’15 Nuance thus signifies freedom from oppressive dogma, which axiomatic geometry symbolises. The edge of nuance in Scully’s paintings gnaws at his geometrical blocks, bringing their absoluteness into question. The borders between them blurred into nuance, they lose their schematic inevitability. Indeed, the sometimes crazy quilt pattern also undermines their clarity and coherence, for it gives them a more nuanced, ‘soulful’ look, as though they were an eccentric landscape rather than what Mondrian called a demonstration of ‘the mathematical artistic temperament’ which he found in the modern metropolis. Scully’s walls are not what they seem to be — geometry is not as dominating as it seems. The conflict between dogma and sensibility — ideologically dehumanised form and humane nuanced receptivity — rages in them. The organic colours of the soul nuance the inorganic universal geometry, but also seem to apotheosise it. The only thing that prevents this deification — that reveals that geometrical form is not unconditional truth but conditionally real — is the relativised space of nuance between Scully’s bricks. The spiritual radiance that suffuses their colour, and subtly pervades Scully’s paintings, can be felt in it. Thus the truly ideal appears only as a nuance of the unmistakably actual — the geometrical datum. Light haunts even Scully’s most gnostic works, such as Durango and Union black. Demiurgic black never quite obliterates the light that relativises it. Nuance creates numinosity — it is a trace of aura. For Scully, a trace of light remains even when all seems lost — when space itself has become no more than a shadow of itself, which is what occurs in mystical experience, as Huxley suggests. For Whitehead, ‘the heightening of intensity arises from order [when] the multiplicity of components ... can enter explicit feeling as contrasts, and are not dismissed ... as incompatibilities’.16 When is a contrast an incompatibility and an incompatibility a contrast in a Scully abstraction? In the pastel 11.25.90 1990, a large blue square — composed of small blue squares, each a construction of blue rectangles — forms a figure on a ground of alternating red and white rectangles, all rather broad, immense, and murky, especially compared to the small, distinctly blue squares. The fact that the large blue square slightly overlaps the last red rectangle on the left in the stripe-like arrangement seems to confirm its incompatibility with the ground. The blue and red as well as the squares and rectangles are incompatible — and yet the rectangles that form the small squares within the large square have a certain affinity with the rectangles that form the ground, and the red seems to project as strongly as the blue. Thus there is a sense of latent contrast as well as manifest incompatibility, and with that, latent unity as well as a manifest lack of unity. The uncertain oscillation between incompatibility and contrast, and yet the sense that they are subliminally the same — that a juxtaposition of differently coloured geometrical forms can be read as both an incompatibility and a contrast, with no loss of truth (thus the antinomic character of Scully’s paintings) — heightens the tension of the work. Again and again we see Scully treading the fine line between incompatibility and contrast — Union yellow 1994, makes the point clearly (the sides are obviously incompatible and polarised, but also form a convincing contrast, suggesting that they subliminally cohere), the pastel 7.10.93 1993, more extremely (the red and blue striped square in the upper right corner hardly seems to belong in the work, and yet its squareness, and the blue, suggests that it does) — while using an atmospheric surface to draw the geometrical components together, informally uniting them. Scully always keeps to the surface, eschewing the illusion of spatial depth, but his surface manages to convey depth through the ‘confusion’ of incompatibility and contrast — another cause of indeterminacy — and his oddly febrile colours. Writing about van Gogh’s ‘portrait’ of a chair (Van Gogh’s chair 1888 Tate Gallery, London; Scully has a reproduction of a van Gogh sunflower painting over his desk), Huxley notes that, ‘though incomparably more real than the chair of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem … Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness’.17 Scully is no doubt a resolute abstract artist, but he makes it clear that abstract art is not for beginners nor a dead-end, for he shows that its Suchness is not ersatz. For Scully, abstract art is not an expressive symbol of the Suchness of being, but Suchness manifested. Art is an avenue to Suchness, as van Gogh’s art shows, but abstract art is Suchness itself, as Scully’s abstract art shows. At its best, as in Scully’s works, abstract art is Suchness confessing its presence. Huxley writes: ‘The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern’.18 In the altered state of consciousness, which is Scully’s abstract painting, geometry becomes intense and colour becomes profound. Their Suchness becomes self-evident. The doors of perception are flung wide open: the Suchness of their unity becomes self-evident. The sublime Suchness of relational patterns and of moving light becomes manifest. Rescuing the fundamentals of abstraction from those who have entropically simplified it, and do so to deny its spiritual, dialectical, and expressive character, thus stripping it of inwardness — Judd is their spokesperson — Scully shows us that abstract art can still be a unique revelation of spiritual Suchness: the mystical unity of Datum and Sensum in aesthetic experience. 1 Systemic
painting exhibition curated by Lawrence Alloway, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum,
New York 22 September–27 November 1966. (Editor’s note) |
|
|
| NGA Home | Introduction | Gallery | Search | Essays | Learning | Visiting | Previous |
|
At first, Sean Scully seems like a formalist in Clement Greenberg’s sense: a modernist painter, finessing the flatness of the canvas with broad patches of colour that have their own flatness, however tentative and tenuous that flatness — however much the paintings propose depth through the often sweeping (if oddly terse and impacted) brushwork with which they are painted. The colours are generally muted, with sudden eruptions of the primaries, often in asymmetrical, subtly jarring combinations — red and blue in Wall of light red 1999, yellow and blue in Yellow bar 2002, to mention only a few works. White rarely appears purely, but rather muted by grey or blue and at odds with black, as in Durango 1990, and Union white 1994 and Union black 1994. There is a Mondrianesque look to Scully’s paintings and pastels — Mondrian ‘clarified’ by Minimalism, as the explicit grid in many works suggests. Thus the tendency to ‘minimalist’ simplicity, confirmed by the repetitive use of geometrical modules — the rectangular Lego blocks, as it were, with which Scully builds or constructs his painting — is at odds with the brooding ‘maximalist’ colours with which they are painted. Sensually dense, Scully’s colours look more felt than matter-of-fact, that is, emotionally charged rather than ‘flatly’ given. Thus a spartan economy of formal means combines with subtly opulent colour, giving the paintings uncanny presence.