WRITING

 

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... 

                                                                                                                   

Killers

In thinking more about art making, I began to say to myself, perhaps the next step is not to think of what can now be done in this day and age, but maybe, what could be undone? Is it easier to just replace something rather than giving it new life? Just because something is new, does not, by any means, automatically make it better. Furniture today is hardly made as well as it used to be, and the same goes for a lot of homes too. I think we fall into this trap, that the new is much more exciting and intelligent. After all, it is new, and to be new it must have surpassed whatever it’s replacing in a progressive, refined, and more sophisticated way, right? But this is hardly ever the case. As the saying goes, “they just don’t make them like they used to”. If time, effort, craft, and quality is now being boldly rationed or deducted, and the end product (whatever it may be: furniture, appliances, clothes, ideas, relationships etc.) is substantially poorer than before, why do we like it? Perhaps it’s one thing if the thought behind the thing is clever, challenging, and intelligent, but if its sole purpose is to be new, then I think it is simple and a waste of our time.  Because, lets not fool ourselves, we as artists are asking ourselves a lot of times, what can I use, make, or think of that is just different, and then we work from there. But how genuine or intelligent is that?  And do we have a choice? C.S. Lewis makes an interesting claim about originality, saying:

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

 

Lewis’ quote brings up a great and highly thought provoking point, and is somewhat reminiscent of the Bauhaus and their mode of teaching. When the Bauhaus started in 1919, there was no teaching of art history, so there was nothing to reference, nothing to compare to, and ultimately, nothing to compete with. There was only making, and with the mind set that you were making ‘art’ for the first time in history. It seems like people are racing all the time to try and take the next step for all of humanity, making their mark on history to be seen as a revolutionary. Even as far back as Malevich and up through art history, artists have been trying to make ‘the last painting’, so that nothing could be done after it. It seems more like this train of thought is trying to kill and destroy rather than to invent, create or give life, like the Bauhaus.

By now, in this art world, and in the world in general, old ideas or ways of thinking rapidly become taboo or obsolete. And it’s not that your idea is ultimately invalid it seems, but it is less legitimized in the eyes of the current time, only because some one else has thought up something different. In this age, we know that there is no just making something, and to be honest, I’m not sure where I stand on the subject just yet. Yes, I think you should think about what you do, and do with reason (whatever it is, and it obviously does not all depend on me,) but then I suppose it is reason that is in question all of the time. Why has anything changed over time, including art? We get bored, if you ask me. It dose not matter how well you paint, or what you make, because if it doesn’t meet the standards and needs of the times then it is hence irrelevant. If I may be so bold, it seems that art, and the rest of the world, changes by default, regardless of the validity of the subject. We change our minds, and want something new, and so we try to change everything else, and in the name of 'Progress' no less, claiming it to be better than before.

Jackson Pollock made it big because it was a show no one had yet seen, and now people are over it. Yes, he is still widely admired, and rightly so, but could Pollok himself make that work today? Absolutely not. Not even in the slightest. Andrew Wyeth, for example, is an artist that did not budge all through his career, spanning from the 1930s till his death in 2010, making the same paintings all the long, of the same old barns, cape cod homes, fields, and people. But over time, his work was no longer in dialog with the rest of the art world. The times changed, the art world changed, but he did not; and why should he? Some people, similarly to Wyeth, like Giorgio Morandi, only painted still lives over his whole career (and in all honesty, I’d much rather go on looking at Morandis my whole life than, say, any of Damien Hirst’s work.) If the times, and the type of production of work are changing, do I have to as well?

With technology continuing to cast spells on us with its constant advancement, leaving us saying, “Well I’ve never had that before,” or “ I couldn’t do that with my old ‘x’” or “I’ve never seen a ‘y’ do that before.” It is a mere shallow trick of spectacle, that is, like Hirst’s work, tagged with a dollar sign in the end, and hardly much more. Worse of all, we think we need it all to survive, and the scary thing is, that the world is ‘progressing’ so that it will be true, and is for some already. In the end, our motives are the cause of most things in the world: the art world, the business world, all formed from and for ourselves and our desires (needless to say, some prevail more than others.) So what are we trying so hard to ‘progress’ toward anyhow? It seems more and more the saying changes from ‘Now you can do this’ to ‘Now you need this.’ Our liberties and freedoms slowly become mandates, as artists, and as people. Some say that the art world has no rules, yet we all know that the unspoken rule is, that it most certainly does. Perhaps that’s the catch to most things.

                                                                                                                   

EAST OF ETERNITY
THESIS ESSAY
BY
STEPHEN EVANS

Time is the perpetual countdown to the end of all things, and is the ultimate signifier of our temporality. “In the beginning God…” as states the first verse of the book of Genesis, illustrates the start of all we know, and subsequently renders a picture of a beginning with a corresponding end. Whether it exists on the face of a clock, the grid of a calendar, or the streak of gray in one’s hair, we are all intimately familiar with time. We all move through time in our own way, and are in most cases dependent upon it. Enveloping all things, including past, present, and future, it stands to reveal its uncontrollable and ever fleeting manner. In my working I have brought myself to question the issue of time on a grand scale and what it means to me: The idea of time being given as a means of something expendable, as well as the idea of it being taken/spent as apposed to being used. I feel to emphasize the fleetingness of our time on this earth, is to amplify its preciousness, and to draw specific attention to how important it is that we make the best use of it while we can. My work is very much about the formal as it is the spiritual and emotional. In my work, I deal with symbolism through the means of minimal abstraction and collage. In some cases the pieces are more of an embodiment of a concept or ideal, and in other cases, they stand to represent something more narrative. I agree with Kandinsky, in the sense that I too feel that there is an initial, physical, and optical reaction to an image that takes place in the eye, but that it may also go further to touch on another level of a being: the emotional and spiritual level. I believe that the formal issues of art are perfect vehicles for the allegorical, and may further more leave the message to supersede the artwork itself.

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel… we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. –C. S. Lewis

Lewis writes about the timelessness of God, and about the time frame in which we live, with fleeting moments and intrusive futures, and how ultimately expendable it all really is for us.
To see time as a whole, or to understand that time exists as one thing, is to come to the realization of a start and a finish, a beginning and an end, or an ultimate sense of boundaries. If we were to hold an object in our hands, we would recognize the edges, the plains, and we would see where the object ends, and where the deep space that surrounds it begins.

All photographs are memento mori. –Susan Sontag

Not only does time’s having a beginning and an end exist on a grander scale, but it is also something that exists on an individual, as well as a personal level: there being a beginning and an end to everyone and everything—a lifetime. The photo, Sontag is saying, is the material proof that time does in fact pass, fade, deplete, and die; and that photos are not only a visual record or evidence of a specific event, but it is a depiction or caption of time that has withered and died. As Sontag says, a “memento mori”—a memorial to dead time. The present rapidly becomes past at every second, laying way for the future which remains ahead and out of sight at all times.

Abstract constructs have been devised as a way to feel as though we have a grip on such a thing as time, or as if we ourselves make the future. Calendars are one example, where we may look at time in advance only as an arrangement of squares, vacant of plans to be plotted on the grid, and to further make sense of something virtually abstract. These devices (calendars, clocks, date books etc.) are man’s attempt to contain something uncontainable, as a means of rationing, as well as merely conceiving. Like staring out across the Grand Canyon, the vastness of something so great nearly disables one’s ability to come to any full rationalization of it, unless it is captured in the frame of a photograph or seen through a lens. Either way, the vast and overwhelmingly pure essence of the thing is diluted in order to be constrained for the human mind. In a sense, the grid of the calendar helps to reiterate the theory that as each day, week, month, and year, begins and ends, just as the very object ends in space, so does the time itself; and like the calendar, each day is numbered. Time is not in the business of moving in any other direction but forward. Which is why we make plans in the future, and not the past. Not even the day just passed could you affect in anyway possible. For we say that calendars and such are for keeping track of affairs, arranging meetings, remembering dates, events, and all the rest, yet not one of them may be carried out if time has stopped for any one individual. What are we really keeping track of, and what does time actually stand to show us?

But if the object is not itself seen, but only heard, the mind of the hearer receives an abstract impression only…and a corresponding vibration is immediately set up in the HEART. –Wassily Kandinsky

We have not seen God, but we have His word (The Scriptures). And in the same way that Kandinsky speaks about objects, so too could this apply to the way in which we experience God—abstractly. We merely get a view of God, through His interactions and works, with and through human beings, but we do not see God Himself. Art, already being something experiential, stands to lend an affective way of experiencing God through a medium. But not just art, but the formal issues of art, through means of symbolism via minimal abstraction. In this mode of working, perhaps the essence of a thing is revealed without facades, in a pure and basic form. To stand and reflect on an actual object, and read the information given as something representative of something larger than itself. As God’s word and people are an embodiment of His presents on earth, so could artwork do the same. Furthermore representing God and His essence through a form that engages and provokes discourse, extending the works meaning beyond its formal and material being.

Morning has not occurred!
That shall aurora be
East of eternity... —Emily Dickinson


Time, having a beginning and an end, therefore leaves the space between the two—our existence as we know it. Our everyday lives as humans wade in the temporal, vulnerable to the condition of our fragile and rationed existence. Time could stop for anyone at any moment. What it would be like to wake up every morning to the realization of this fact, and to adhere the very notion to our hearts at all times. Among the trials and troubles of our everyday lives, perhaps we would attempt to be more patient, and administer more love and kindness. Perhaps if we were to value every second of our lives on earth, we would weigh the worth of our own pride, to be less self-seeking, and more readily to forgive, protect, trust, hope, and preserve; that maybe even we ourselves could stand to represent something more than our material being. For now it is night, and though the sun has not yet risen, the dawn will be at the horizon of eternity, and all will be new.

                                                                                                                        

Joseph and Nicodemus

In making this piece, I had been thinking about Christ’s wounds, His death, and His burial. In the book of John, chapter 19, verses 38-42, the claiming of Jesus’ body is described:

38Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jews. With Pilate's permission, he came and took the body away. 39He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.[a] 40Taking Jesus' body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. 41At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. 42Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

In working on this piece, it aloud me to reflect on my own faith in Jesus, and the way in which I prescribe it to myself. In this passage, Joseph goes to claim Christ’s body, but he does it in secret. He is afraid of the Jews. He is afraid of being associated with Jesus. He is afraid of being persecuted because of his association. He is afraid of death. But not just Joseph, but Nicodemus as well, had gone in secrecy. Nicodemus had already visited Jesus in secret when he was alive out of fear also. These two men, disciples of Jesus, go to claim his body for burial. So here they are doing one thing; claiming Jesus (but in secret for fear of persecution), and disassociating themselves with him. Then after they claim him, the do something that seems somewhat contrary to their previous action. In private, the prepare and dress Jesus for burial. Rapping him in strips of linen, and applying spices to his body, and overall, taking such care, devotion, and lending intimate and loving care to the Lord’s body. What they did in private for the Lord, is quite different in comparison to what they did in public. This made me think of how it is related to our every day lives (if you are a Christian). Do you claim Christ in secret, but deny him in public? Do you fear being persecuted for your belief when in the world? Do you claim him in private? In your room? In your car? In your bathroom? And do you leave him there? I asked myself these things, and realized that I was claiming Christ in private; praying, worshiping, praising, reading God’s word, and devoting to Him in the comfort of my own room. I was afraid of what people would think, say, or do because of my belief in Jesus. Secretly a disciple, afraid of persecution. All my art work is centered on my faith in Jesus, yet when it came time to talk about it, I kept it secret. Then what was the point of making this work? What was the point in being a follower of Christ? What was the point of the work Christ did for me if I were to just deny him and do nothing? When I realized this, I came to the conclusion that this needed changing. John 16:33 says this:

“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

Christ has overcome the world. On the cross, Christ said “it is finished” (John 19:30). All that could be done was done. We will be persecuted, but Christ is with us.
Matthew 28:20 say this:

“…and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Christ did not die to makes us safe, but so that we might follow after him and be bold for a cause. To speak God’s truth, and have his guidance. I have decided to claim Christ in public as one of his followers, and to believe in Him as He believes in me. I decided to not be afraid. For if God is for me, who could be against me? (Romans 8:31)