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Robert Kingston, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA., September 2000;
Brad Kahlhamer, Deitch Projects, New York, May 2001.
Imagine Rilke looking hard at a piece of paper on the clutter of his desk, writing, "My life is: the stillness of form." What sort of awareness had precipitated those words? As always, we measure our passions as the smith would shoe a large gelding: singularly, yet impacted by the suspicious ease of experience. Essentially, that's how we realize our lives: experience and the perceptions that follow. The discussion here is one of paint, with asides to performance, more specifically the performance of self, as it relates to the singularly intimate process of brush to surface; in particular the isolated musings of one Robert Kingston. Kingston, an oddly gentle soul, resembles at first glance a light heavyweight boxer, hitman, or common thug. Without benefit of a serial body of work, Kingston's efforts revolve in a furious tangle of epiphany and revision, laboring in constant search of new formats and imagery, generally within a jet stream of philosophical angst--the way I imagine one such as Camus would paint if, having not bashed his life away in a car, he gave up the pedantics of psychological fiction and turned to the canvas. Late last year, mere weeks before his triumphant show at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, I was privileged to wade through the mire of inspiration and fatigue that collected in his studio as if a syrupy residue. Kingston is, in short, a schizophrenic creator. From the biomorphic to the austere, the atmospheric to the gestural, Kingston waged a primitive battle with himself, mostly. As ice was replaced by glistened puddles, leather jackets traded in for t-shirts and sandals, we paced about between the columns and tall potted plants of his sun-bleached studio, cluttered with art books and sheet music, going over the status of each work in its torrid incompletion.
Our time is one of certain perforated, vicarious experiences. This ooze that Blaise Cendrars called "slavery" swallows a bit of us each day we follow its silky trail until the best of our possibilities is lost. At times, my own personal recipe for the reclamation of soul has bogged down into rather pathetic extremes of drugs, sex, literature, alcohol, and sport. There are specifics to every vice or pastime, hence our loss of philosophical moorings. Mark Rothko recorded, in a statement of 1945, "I would sooner confer anthropomorphic attributes upon a stone than dehumanize the slightest possibility of consciousness." It is, of course, this simplicity that is being drained from us; the innocence of the first person, the action (Rosenberg aside), discourse, and illumination of true quotidian experience, what Neruda called "the sumptuous appeal of the tactile." Painting, then, is our vehicle back to this age, this cavern of abandoned glory, musty with the soot of a gracious authenticity, fecund with the stalking scent of the real, and of beauty. To my way of thinking, painting needs no explanation or apology. This most religious of artforms belies the pathetic empiricisms of contemporary discussions by those frustrated with its insistence on gracious discovery. It is still said, in some circles, that Pollock's Namuth-captured athleticisms over and into his unprimed canvas served as a precursor to today's performance art tendencies. If that hypothesis holds true, performance art began and ended with this tortured man's motions. This was the realization of fine art as enacted by the scion of a most American dilemma: the artist at odds with the polarities of self; the effete lyricist breaking the skin of knuckles over the jaws of the unenlightened (or, perhaps, the sober), the seeking for an individuality constrained by the intemperate shadows of European icons. All this, combined with the ambitions of a talented photographer.
From these stills and the resulting film, theorems developed that placed the impetus of creation in very physical terms. This sudden engagement, along with timely critical analysis, provided a vehicle for the discussion of the bodily motions inherent to the realization of paintings. From here, with the latter developments of "actions" and radical street theatre, the art world seemed to give itself over to a thematic pursuit of body over mind (or, maybe, just aesthetics). Combine these searches with the resultant populist movements against objectivity and cumulative taste and it's no surprise that we have arrived upon this state of art in the Remedial States of America. Simply put, the position of overcoming the "object" in terms of artistic relevance rapidly became an adolescent rebellion of a most pedestrian intensity. I recall that Octavio Paz stated that "Dada failed because it believed that the defeat of language would be the triumph of the poet." In general, we are farthest from a viable reality when we attempt to circumvent one. That said, I will not bother going into the inanity of individuals shaving pubic hair, regurgitating foreign substances, or masturbating (figuratively or literally) in the crisp surroundings of galleries. Such is the state of our era. The powerful abstractionist Pat Lipsky, over a Chinese dinner on Ninth Avenue, quoted her old friend Clement Greenberg, if I may: "'Every time I thought things had bottomed out in the art world, that they couldn't get any worse, I'd turn around and see, No, they had gone lower still.'"
All of us hide behind something. Sadly, it seems that many in the mode of creation hide behind various neuroses, oddly enough, wrapped in the wool of concept and partial theory. As artists, we are afforded the guise of the common box turtle, capable of receding into our self-contained shelters, be it the alcoholic extremities of Theodore Roethke, or the crazed political fumblings of Cernier, Pound, or Céline. In the end, however, we are left with material and words; painting and poetry; the meat of what propels us. This is the vitality of Kingston's work: the burning intensity of an individual wrapped in the struggle. The intensity of time alone, pacing the expanse from surface to viewpoint; the shifting of weight from foot to foot, hips arching under the movement of arm and wrist, extending up to the glowing trail of color left in its wake. Seldom have I had the honor of watching an artist at work; generally, it's just not very possible, creation is a most solitary pursuit. However, the few times I momentarily witnessed Kingston involved in the act of re-working paintings, I was struck by the purity of the tradition we both followed; the tradition and the sheer actuality of what was happening. Heidegger, of course, discussed the origins of art, albeit more as a presentation of general semantics than the nature of form itself. But it is that form that draws us ineluctably to the arts, form taking the stature of the sublime. The line, the tone of color, or lack thereof. If you take the time away from drinking cheap wine at most galleries, you'll find that the art is a very generalized product. There is thematic ineptitude, processed inventions of a very obvious political nature, sexual mispronouncements and manifests, along with the boring excesses of identity. To be fair, art is a vehicle of personal expression, but for some reason many contemporary expressions seem to be based on a complex condition of values seemingly developed by poor grasps of irony, comic book imagery, and incoherent Hegelian assumptions.
That aside, the past year or so has brought us a frenzy of brash, muscular painting. Most publicly, Deitch Projects offered up the work of Brad Kahlhamer, as sublimely chaotic a painter as there is. Kahlhamer's work is enough to make one retreat to the atelier in a fit of angst over a body of work yet to be conceived. Bluntly, he makes you want to paint . . . and paint. This, to my mind, is what art should elicit: the drive and need to create. His aggravated drips and clouds of color evoke the mysteries of Twombly while at the same time exercising the narrative force of Basquiat--or, if at odds with so timely a reference, any number of early modern masters. Kahlhamer's oeuvre has matured over the four years since I first encountered his work. It seems that he alone has grasped the ability to wield complex social schematics with the artillery of a painter's painter. Hearkening to his Native American roots, Kahlhamer wove a vivid tale of western expansion and exploitation, while bringing up his own history of blues and rock'n'roll. The largest canvasses were compiled of distinct visual tales, brought together by a somewhat flawless composition. Again, Basquiat (at his best) comes to mind--the rapid-fire presentation of idea and conclusion; the raw, innate sexuality of the ancient medium, set ablaze by a life, I would reckon, led brazenly and expansively.
Other voices fighting the good fight include Chris Martin, with his leviathans of reworked simplicities; Santi Moix; Pat Lipsky's sensuous investigations of color, shown most recently at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York; Paul Campbell's improvisations of application; Jim Murray, Gayle Ruskin-White, Robin Ross, and John Zinsser. As artists, we reach for a vein of certainty within a dense wilderness of doubt, actuality, and, most romantically, a grave, decidedly ostentatious ennui. That is the importance of this recent work: the naked euphoria in applying paint to a surface, the unfettered dance of wondrous hours in a solitude most can only dimly conceive.
Now, in the swirl of the present (whatever that is), Kingston is again battling with the strong arm of the muse. The show is set at the Bachofner Gallery for September 2000. A few weeks before my departure for Geneva as one of two solo exhibitions at Galerie Expressions-Lagrouni, along with the Belgian painter David Clement (a vigorous proponent of egg tempera and a shadowy floral motif), Kingston was in the midst of stretching, priming, and sanding several large canvasses. Within my first three weeks back in New York, Kingston's work had morphed from an open, line-oriented gesturalism to a baroque, centrally-wound format that could have perhaps been termed a new analysis of cubist formalities. Kingston's subtle palette (comprised of flowery shades and mineral tonalities), along with his draftsmanship, lent itself perfectly to this stylistic venture. However, it was quite obvious that he wasn't satisfied with this new approach; his comments on the work veered from justification and explanations to sincere questions of stability and force. I offered whatever there was I had to say and retired to my own studio, to prepare work for my own rapidly approaching solo show at Galerie Melon--in, of all places, Sofia, Bulgaria.
During my two weeks in Bulgaria, Kingston's painting underwent two radical metamorphoses. The end result was a startling expression of geometric philosophies--one a foggy narrative of semi-hard edged squares exploring dynamic balances, the other a jazz-fueled poetry of urban structures and color dominated by an off-kilter, squat rectangular shape. Surprisingly, the two examples of the new body of work stood very much together as a whole. In the sunlit expanse of Kingston's studio, the paintings--leaning, stacked, and hanging--complemented each other beautifully. Painting moves us for an infinite number of reasons. The seduction of color, the path of the brush over pigment, the evocative power of that which is nearly lost in the layers. We relate to painting much as we relate to powerful music; we give over our inner workings to the influence of the particular art. For the sensitive listener or viewer, there is a collateral exchange of information; the artist brings his take on things and you bring your feelings, your history. With truly important abstract painting, there is the breathtaking thump of sensuality that usually accompanies post-coital sloth, or perhaps finer moments of dining, perhaps sunsets over the roiling paths of rivers, your lover's laugh, the light of dusk through the fingers of a child.
Walking into the Ruth Bachofner Gallery from the heat of a Los Angeles September, I mused, somewhat ponderously, on the diffident comparisons between the art scenes of NYC and this built-up land of flooded desert and hills. It seems that in LA there is an expectation of distance that eludes the NYC artist. In New York, I generally encounter artists of all hues, talking about how busy they are--busy with almost everything except the creation of art. It's easy to get mired down with the gross excesses of rent, bills, and drinking free wine at openings, but that's the point: it's easy, an easy way out of the lonely hours of contemplation and humility that are needed to paint. Or, for that matter, to write poems, novels, carve wood, what have you. Because of its geography, the art scene of New York is built on motion: 57th Street to Chelsea, down to SoHo, and then off to frontiers of Brooklyn and Queens. In Los Angeles, the geography dictates a more settled environment; you can't build a scene with the scenesters separated by countless miles of highway. In New York, it's possible to breathe in the ghosts of giants; in LA, the giants stand as tall (Bukowski, Diebenkorn, and Kingston's mentor, Ed Moses), yet they are so much fewer in number. This is, after all, the capital of the movie business; the history here is of fantasy and fulfillment. Perhaps this explains the ridiculous puerility of that triumvirate of shock: McCarthy, Oursler, and Kelley. In a more pastoral sense, Kingston himself, in a phone conversation, spoke eloquently of the Zen influence of the Pacific Rim. Of course, these musings were triggered by a very LA afternoon: lulling brusquely poolside, grilling oysters and mussels, contemplating the wave of telephone lines over the ragged strands of palm trees, helicopters and the contrails of jets bringing me back to the whole of things. In the end, drawing these comparisons is like drawing comparisons between Gogol and Mayakovsky, tradition versus revolution, prose versus poetry. In truth, there are grander actualities to focus on, alas; we're but students of a century over our shoulders.
With the thump of a basketball echoing in from the parking lot, I wandered from painting to painting. My emotions were spent in both reverie of the months before and the wonder of what Kingston had done; before me, in broad horizontal flourishes, I took in the nature of inspiration, the passion of color, and the iron glory of spontaneity that can only come from works of a brutal honesty. Somnambulist offers up a superior example of what could be termed the linear sublime. Breaking upon itself in a vortex of semi-hard edged squares, multifaceted in surface function and orientation, this piece balances its dense potency with a subdued palette of creamy ivories, leathered whites, and umbers that seemingly melted into one another's structural territories. One senses the weight of a delicate armature beneath the breathlike undulations of formality that bring the disparate perimeters to a point of climax, a climax that achieves some of the wonder associated with Rothko's blocks of color and mortality. Citystyle Blue and Caravan, with their looser, handpainted procession of rectangles and submerged architectural grids, bring Kingston's appreciation for jazz to the forefront. Running in what could be called a melodic (as opposed to harmonic) vein, these works jumble the traditions of composition into more contemporary values that hearken to a creative state rarely achieved or depicted. In these works, Kingston again blends aged pales with stains and reworkings; however, the colors have turned towards an opacity, that, along with an abundance of sharp whites and blacks, reflect back into the viewer the sense of mystery seen in Somnambulist, though somewhat harsher. In Somnambulist, Kingston uses a variety of painterly approaches within the various square interiors; the character of each form rests in its unique application: the long unbroken brushstroke, the sharp pull of a knife, the referential antiquity of newspaper transfers poking through like drunk memories. With the opacity of Citystyle Blue and Caravan, a quickened thread is wound about the visual experience; the colors--from brick red, siennas, and teal in Caravan to the lusty ceruleans of Citystyle Blue--dart out, aggressive in their joy, enamored of their sheer being. These are works that mark Kingston a truly formidable colorist.
I should mention that the atmospherics of Somnambulist struck me as a more powerful movement than either Citystyle Blue or Caravan; however, it is Attica and a painting Kingston made in Los Angeles in the weeks preceding the show, Rewire, along with Island City, that celebrate best both abstraction itself and the sting of Kingston's talent. These works fall into a middle ground between the poles represented in the show, melding the techniques of paint handling and the distinctions between the sharper and more playful, the ethereal pale to the racy color. This juxtaposition of stylistic treatment with secretive drawing elements mark these pieces as paintings of intense profundity and resonance--they exhibit Kingston distancing himself from his draftsmanship to communicate the physics of consequence on a more hermetic level. In Attica, Kingston plies the trade of atmospherical motion in the base of the surface with a bony, yellowed white, six dark squares (five black, one a dark stained umber) dancing in the lower third of the panel, extending to the upper left. Several other shapes evoke the melodies of Citystyle Blue and Caravan, though pushed back into the softer realms of the painting. In Rewire, Kingston lightens the work as a whole, introducing dusty rose pinks and denimed blues. The open placement of the geometric components of the work is joined by a network of scratchy, stuttered lines.
With Island City, Kingston brings a youthful playfulness to his formality. If you chance through Long Island City, this painting will prompt from you a bemused smile; this is abstraction as a very referential tool. Franz Kline said, "I don't have the feeling that something has to be completely non-associative as far as figure form is concerned." Like Kline's structured calligraphics, this is the dream of what survives from our days. In these works, Kingston's vocabulary drops behind an ambient meditation of materials and tonalities, the drawing elements twist to discreet illustrations that bring to mind the aged graffitti reworkings of degraded urban surfaces, or perhaps Twombly in his more mature moments. The drawings, in a sense, stand as clues to Kingston's world; they accept figurative references, yet fend off the sinew of too literal a suggestion; they allow the viewer just so close, only to turn them back to the trail behind them. As with the earlier, prototypical paintings Kingston toiled over, perhaps the semi-literate tone of these works hark back to certain examples of a most analytic cubism; indeed, perhaps Kingston's purposeful scrawl could be the distant progeny of Braque's nail in Still Life with Violin and Pitcher, a feature of knowing intrusion in the face of the all too human path of art. There is a rush to be found in the maze of things artistic; we still cry at the closing of some novels. With so much information careening into us, the small, enigmatic moments of human dignity mean so much. With Kingston's painting, it's possible to accept the catastrophe of culture about our shoulders and smile the weary smile of Rilke, pushing away from the desk. Within his tumble of shapes and painterly motion, Kingston illustrates our aesthetic selves as brought to fruition: learned, natural, innate.
You can say many things about a painting but it's best to keep in mind John Marin's directive to Alfred Stieglitz in a letter of 1923: "Painting after all--is painting--just that--and that if you'll paint and paint--and when you get through your paint builds itself up--molds itself--piles itself up--as that rock . . . why then you might call yourself a painter--you might have one or two of the old boys--could they come back--give you a deserved pat on the back." Robert Kingston's a Painter. And he gives us the heroism that the contemporary numb would have us believe irrelevant: his work is one of sincerity, a quality so many today can't seem to cope with, thus opting out for the comical, the ironic. Robinson Jeffers told us that "it is bitter earnestness that makes beauty." Kingston's gambol is an art that entrances us with earnestness, beauty, and the fiery intellect that spawns it. And life goes forward. Through it all, the artist--no, the painter--alone dares to dream as children dream: restless and sincere, bound in the velvet of worlds before them.
Mark Zimmermann, a painter, poet, and frequent contributor to PAJ, lives and works in Long Island City, New York.
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