INLIQUID

I will be participating in this year's INLIQUID benefit show. For more information, click on the image above.

NEW COLLAGE

Upon The Page

22x18"

 Mixed media on paper

WORK IN PROGRESS: THE SPIRIT IN THE MINIMAL

As I mentioned in an earlier post, that I would be doing a bit of writing, and this would be the start of it. I feel as though I owe explanation and brief description: The gist of all this is that I had sat down with Justin Rubich (my studio mate) to talk about my current work, and though I had been scribbling in my notebook, and thinking, and reading for days and months on end, I had nothing to say. This troubled me, so I thought it was time to get it all out there, polish my thoughts, and write a new thesis. So I am now in the process of collecting my thoughts, notes, and sources for this writing below, which is the first part, and will be followed by multiple others with other focal points. This first part is, I suppose, the introduction, the core of my statement, and equally, the direction of my thoughts in relation to my own work. I chose work by Donald Judd that I had seen in person on a trip to southwest Texas (seen in the image above) as a focal point for this discussion, and as a premises to base my thesis. It serves as a good model I feel.

So as I continue to research, write in my notebook, and collect material, I will be adding to this thesis over time, hopefully within a reasonable time span  (as I would like to be articulate, I’m trying not to rush it too much.)

Thank you to anyone who is reading.

 

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I may have mentioned it here or there before, but I find that the attraction and meditative quality that nature holds is quite possibly because it is closer to the origin of things—closer to the purity of existence—a beautiful simplicity. Perhaps this is also where pure color fits in to the mix as well. Like staring into the sky, or sitting in an open field. It almost seems like there is no wonder why God and spirituality is sought after so often in nature, and can be felt through pure abstraction and color.  Not only that, but it evokes something eternal in us, like staring out at the horizon, seemingly continuing forever. There is a stillness that speaks to us on another level. It is a sound or feeling that is, like thought itself, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it’s intangible. There is a stillness that frees us from the world and worldly things, and makes us feel more human. Anyone who may know a thing or two about these matters might think of Agnes Martin, contributing the “wordlessness of landscape” to her paintings: “Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field for awhile can see my paintings.” Nature being in the purest form, the same as it was since the beginning, harkens back to something primeval. Perhaps it is the purity of creation that is what arouses our souls, and why pure color, abstract form, and nature (embodying the same boundless essence) speaks to us in an unexplainable way. Perhaps it is in abstraction, the indefinable, and the “shapeless”, that we find familiarity to that of the spirit of God.

In an article written in 1961 by Robert Rosenblum titled The Abstract Sublime, he quotes Immanuel Kant from his Critique of Judgment (1790) stating, “the Beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries, the sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, doundlessness is represented.” Rosenblum further points out in the same article that, “As the Romantics discovered, all the sublimity of God can be found in the simplest natural phenomena...” When faced with quotations like these I can’t help but remember standing on the red-brown soil of the desert in Marfa, Texas before Donald Judd’s huge concrete sculptures. The herd of large objects stationary in their tracks, like boulders, or large trees, as if the pieces grew up from out of the ground. Out here the art exists without museums, the white gallery walls, devoid of utility or commoditization, becoming part of the landscape itself; taken from any social concepts, and free from paradigms. It has become, like Agnes Martin’s paintings, an  object of “wordlessness.” There is no description of any event outside of itself, but rather it is the event. In a way, the site specific instillation makes the site itself readymade. In turn this leads to a negation: a negation of all things worldly. In fact, it is as if they were pre-existing, or a priori if you will. 

The impact of viewing such objects is like seeing the natural wonders of our universe, or the pre-existing models of our rhetoric and understanding (like mathematics.) It's like something that is discovered or reveled or unearthed, but always existed. It relates to how Barnett Newman spoke of his paintings: “My paintings physically declare the area as a whole from the very beginning. They are not a construction.” As such a blank slate, an objective form, the subjectivity of the viewer is overwhelming, and the natural phenomenon of the object is now at work. It is from the object of form and boundaries that the formless and boundless appears: like water flowing from the rock: it is at this point that it goes beyond its natural self, almost demanding the question: “why is there something rather than nothing?” Perhaps it is for this reason I find minimalism so inherently spiritual. On the contrary, one could argue that the work of "minimalist" artists (though it is understood that “minimalist” was a loose term that not all labeled as such necessarily prescribed to) like Judd are devoid of any content or meaning, being sole material, making declaration that it is an object (beautiful at that,) and it exists in this world alone. As if to have a material awakening is to resolve any conjecture about things transcendental. As the work “pulls no punches” and has no “tricks”, it is this sole materiality that gives it such life and spirit. 

So it would seem contradictory or illusory given the information above that such a claim would hold true, or solely at least. Because to emphasize on something’s essence is to raise assumptions about its core being, its “thingness.” It’s in this state of natural phenomena, as scientist and mathematician, John Lennox points out, to assert “the words ‘nothing but’, the statements go beyond science and become expressions of materialist or natural belief.”  So it would seem that it is drawing nearer to something more existential, and, subsequently, something more transcendental. One of the pinpoints of the transcendental in minimalism is the mere feet it aims to achieve (knowingly or not,) and that is what is called “Total Transcendence”. This is to have utter and total transcendence over all subjectivity, seeing solely objectively, “Pure Objectivity.” But perhaps it is here that we catch a snag in passage, because in usual terms, we deal with the objective and subjective as a means of understanding, and I’m not so sure that, from the “minimalist” prospective, this work is meant to be understood (or fully at least.) Furthermore, anything that would acquire the objectivity needed for “Total Transcendence” would hence require total autonomy, which by virtue of its having been created by a mind, and thus relating to that mind, renders the object in question anything but autonomous. In fact, it speaks of relation. It is the presents of the “why”, the subjectivity, which leaves us to the algorithmic method, to test the material and any belief in conjunction. “Total Transcendence” would seem to be out of the picture for these reasons, and it would seem that it is better fit that it relate to what would then be called “Semi-Transcendence”.  As Christian Apologist Ravi Zacharias puts it: ‘We can trust our findings with certainty, but we are not so “outside the box” that the box is nothing more than an object of study.’ So the material is not merely the material is it?  Though we may have the “what” and the “how,” the “why” is much less easy to attain. Since we are very much “inside the box,” that leaves only the assertion that there is an “outside.” This “outside” is what can be attributed to the “why,” and from our prospective, we must determine for ourselves that "why" as well as the in-between.

To be continued...