Dennis Hollingsworth

notes on a conversation with S.C.

(A friend was in the city for a visit, we had great conversations. Just after he took off, I was thinking about it, too much, so I started to jot notes to externalize the thoughts and examine them. He mentioned his appreciation of art that doesn't look like art. I suggested that this avenue gets eclipsed too fast in our culture, that perhaps the issue in his sculpture was about something like facture in painting, paint handling, plasticity.

I'll continue dumping thoughts after the jump...)

...so the problem is how one can capture art in the wild, before the domestication of the frame. It's a tricky thing to do. Once you apprehend the wild thing, you domesticate it. A measure of wildness is lost. In terms of painting, one can paint with wildness, carelessness, like a crazy person... but for how long? How can one resist the concretion of method?

Alfred Jarry comes to mind with his pataphysics. He was as wild as a bar fly with a gun who was willing to shoot it off as a method of punctuation. One could prolong this adventure with complexity and play, with irreverence and humor. He was like a squid that squirts ink in an escape from the confinement of rationality. Bewilderment was his method (like McCarthy too?). But Jarry also always made poetic sense, his imagination didn't close down as it does in an environment constituted only of noise. There are other methods, too. One could be feral and refuse to marry any medium, where life as an artist is a series of one night stands with art media and method. Jarry was good, great even, and the good die young. Methods of revolt in the realm of the imagination impinge on the realm of life, thus shortening it. Maybe shortening life is a good method too, one could foreclose the foreclosure of technique and everyone will project a subsequent potential that might have been. (But what a terrible thought this is!)

You have to lay in wait. A surprise attack. A random framing action. Didn't Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages do this? He laid traps. The moment of recognizing the beauty of the unplanned skyline is a kind of stoppage. I pause to consider this. But did Marcel ever find himself suspicious that the randomization technique itself was a product of a (suspicious) rational construct? Didn't he stop to think that the string he dropped to the floor was first selected for it's length, for it's thickness, the height of the drop, it's suppleness as it fell. Randomness is harried by the frame. Isn't there an uncertainty principle in operation here? In the way that one can know either position or momentum, one cannot know both at once; so too randomness and framing are complementary variables?

It's about searching for strangeness, isn't it? Some artists do it a little, some a lot, but can any do it to an ultimate extreme, to the point of estrangement?

And perhaps there are substances like the materials of building construction (my friend's preferred palette), of architecture: steel studs, drywall, concrete- that resist the frame of an art gallery or museum precisely because they are too much like what literally constitutes the frame of an exhibition space. Sure, sculptors like Richard Serra used the steel of ship construction, but his work might be too pure (the weight and totality of his various tilted arcs traces a curve for me that leads somehow to Henry Moore) for my friend in this conversation. After all, Serra was no Jarry.

Once you repeat a certain aspect of facture -often a sign of control- you have tamed its savage nature. So how do you continue to employ the "feral" move without substituting for it, a domesticated facsimile of what it once was? (Some artists don't care about this, they carry on and the audience carries on in tacit agreement that they are all outlaws, but we aren't talking about them, we're talking about the real thing.) True wildness doesn't care about art or anything civilized. Wildness moves according to its own agenda, perhaps something resembling Anton Chigurh, a character in the movie No Country for Old Men a film character that I thought was a good representation of the force of nature itself: impersonal, subjecting humanity to the laws of chance, empty of empathy, of all the compassion of a Mack truck that bounced out his freeway lane over the traffic median as it fills up your windshield.

There are creatures that can never be domesticated, like tigers or sharks; or creatures that almost can be cooperative like bears or water buffalos. But can anything in culture compare to this?  War, maybe.  A war between actors within the framework of a Geneva convention would be like the latter dancing bear; a terror war or piracy would be like the former.  A tiger within the fame of a zoo is majestic, but could we feel such majesty if we looked into the eyes of one in a jungle?  In the wild?

Remember the skyline? The profile of the buildings against the sky isn't wild and unplanned, the planning is smaller in scale. The logic of placement of the apparently random elements was made within the logic of each building, of each property owner. These decisions escaped the planner's vision, true, but decision and placement exists. Our perspective shifted to see an aspect we had not considered before. This reminds me of Malevich's revelation of abstraction as it was provoked by the emergence of aerial photography. The view from the air was strange and flying was wild for a time. This frisson of modernity, the thrill of seeing a world without a horizon created abstraction as we know it. Maybe this could be another definition of abstraction: the capture of de-familiarization. It was sudden and thrilling then and we have trying to recreate that feeling ever since.

Why are we attracted to this wild quality? Sex drugs and rock and roll. Danger and copulation always get our attention. It's hardwired in us, the limbic system, the twitch of the amygdala, a brain stem, lizard thing. We all do it in ways great and small. So why do we as artists pander to base things? Perhaps its because its an effective way to reorder our categorical precepts? It's a direct way to wake us up, to be modern in the radical sense of reconciling the life we are living with the things we are making, to strip off all preconceived notions, of inherited conventions. Our cerebral cortex has us living too much in the future or the past, sometimes you've got to break some china to be fully awake in the moment.

Or maybe it's a way for culture to grow by taking bites of the wild and digesting it mouthful by mouthful.