Those of us who cherish the art weve been blessed to collect over the years sometimes dont cherish it enough. After years of living with it, it becomes the visual background of our lives. We forget why we initially could not turn away from it. How the art saw us more deeply that we saw it as we first were looking at it. Here are three of my pieces of art that yesterday I found myself standing in front of and gazing at with a new appreciation. A new love. A newfound understanding of the reasons that cause us to respond to a work of art are buried so deeply within us that they cant be explained away by an aesthetes appreciative gaze alone. The art reaches out to us. Demands its home in our hearts. Because it knows - imbued with its layers of meaning - how it will continue to speak to us in our lives. It knows it is needed. I certainly needed these three works of art in my life in these last few years. They not only inspired me but they anchored me even as they pushed me onward out of the darkness where I had begun to dwell. The first one is by Chicago artist Jim Lutes who for many years was the chair of the department of painting at the school at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hes also been represented in both the Whitney Biennial and the documenta in Kassel, Germany. This work is called Sobriety. I had no idea when I purchased it in the early 1990s that it would speak to me so profoundly today. I used to joke that if I couldnt attain it, I would at least own it. Now I no longer joke about it. When I hung it in my apartment originally in New York, it was those violently stroked scribbles inside the head-like figure to which I responded and all that silent stroke-less space beyond it. But now I stare at that lone chair and realize that it was that chair that was calling me as well. Each time I take my seat in a room full of my fellows on the same journey that Im on, I think of this lone chair that entered my life so long ago knowing that one day I would need to sit in it amidst the quiet sober space in which it itself so simply sits. The second work, Osiris Tree-Man, was done in 1962 by Frank Harrison who was born in Detroit in 1925 and moved to New York in 1947 where he died in 1990. When he arrived in NYC he began to hang out with James Baldwin and his crowd and shared a studio with Cy Twombly when they were first starting out. Peter Acheson writes in The Brooklyn Rail about a show of Harrisons work at the Luise Ross Gallery in New York back in 2006: Harrison used amphetamine, creating a body of drawings in which the pencil lead holds the paper together, so densely are they worked. Not only is the pencil the most economical of tools, lead is the element of Saturn. While Twombly would ascend into the sunlight of success, Harrison would descend into alchemical nigredo—a lonely, isolated, dark time. The images of the speed drawings (his term) emerge from flickering lights and black blacks, not unlike Pollock’s late black and whites. The viewer participates in interpreting the image and is invited to free associate. Image is not a thing, but a story. The pharaonic leaders of Egypt were associated with Osiris in death — as Osiris rose from the dead they would, in union with him, inherit eternal life through a process of imitative magic. And what is art if not imitative magic? In 1975, James Harrison got sober by attending AA meetings and his work begins to take on new layers of meanings. Long before I got sober myself I bought up several of his works. I walked into a gallery one day in Soho and could barely breathe, his work was speaking to me so much that day (was seeing me long before I truly saw it or myself) and I bought four of his canvases, almost emptying out my bank account to do it but knowing that I must bring them into my unfolding life. I knew nothing about him or his own life, his battle with his own addictions, his getting sober, and, his own spiritual journey through his own work. I just knew instinctively this: I must have them. Again Acheson: He called his work painting-drawing. The painters of the sixties he respected most were Guston and de Kooning, artists for whom drawing was also central. He differed, though, in that he did not raise an altar to doubt as they did. His hero was the emerging Self, an archetype, a metaphor. He read Jung, not Kierkegaard, agreeing with the former on the subject of the existence of God, I don’t believe, I know! Nor did he wield the brush that they did. He stayed European, more akin to Giacometti than the American painters. The modernist abandonment of the figure was simply never Harrison’s concern. The vertical human figure was his totem; Cezanne’s solitary male Bather in the entrance of MoMA’s Impressionist gallery remained his touchstone. When Guston returned to the figure, still-life, and landscape, Harrrison commented calmly, He’s doing what old men do, taking inventory. I guess in some way thats what I, an older man now than the young man who first bought those Harrison works, is doing with this post this morning: taking inventory. This third work is Harrisons Osiris: Stepping Out of Darkness. In my own darkest days of my own addiction before I set out on my own spiritual journey toward sobriety through my own attempts at art through my writing, Id lie in bed at the end of another binge and stare deeply into this one work by Harrison and. through tears, try to discern some hope in it. I tried to see my home in the clear-eyed muddle within the frame. It is in that word Stepping - a lone simple word where art sometimes can reside for a writer - where I found my home. I have come to discover through continuing to be still and allowing my art to see me that in that stillness I can continue to step out of my own darkness. It is in such incongruity - the stillness one finds in the truest movement: the spiritual evolvement of the selfless self - where art exists. It is where life does. Id like to ask Osiris if there really is an afterlife or is it just a continuation of consciousness. I like to think that there no after to this life; it is all part of the same experience. But Ill have to get there to ask him. Ill try to ask him artfully.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 18:07:23 +0000
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