CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Pat Steir: Essay for Two Voices

Cheim and Read, New York, 2014

by Raphael Rubinstein

 

A: Are you able to look exclusively at one half of any of these paintings?

B: Wouldn’t that be like ignoring one side of a dialogue?

A: You’re not tempted to see each work as two monochrome paintings resting side by side?

B: These aren’t “monochromes.”  There are multiple colors present that seem to coalesce into one.

A: I know. I’ve looked at them, closely enough to see the various colors deposited along the narrow vertical runnels, and to see how the pigments clump together like grains of sand on a tightly packed beach as the tide comes in or out.

B: Has Pat Steir ever made monochromes?

A: There are some big paintings where a solid color appears to occupy the entire canvas, but even in these works the sense of monochromy disappears after prolonged viewing as multiple colors emerge. I also noticed, in one of the paintings, elements that I want to call “waves.”

B: Really? I thought the artist stopped painting waves in the late 1980s. Where are these waves?

A: In Blue and Silver and Gold the right blue half is broken up by a series of ragged-edge frontiers between areas of darker and lighter paint. This effect was achieved by the artist introducing regular intervals between pours of paint, and letting them stop (that is, dry enough so that gravity was no longer pulling them down) before they reached the bottom of the support. She timed them just as a sailor or surfer times waves. One odd thing about these descending curtains of paint, however, is that they simultaneously suggest falling and rising motion.

B: They look like ranges of mist-covered mountains and valleys, or stalactites and stalagmites. 

A: In Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting, François Cheng describes two important conceptual binary pairs in Chinese painting: k’ai-ho (opening-closure) and ch’i-fu (rising-falling). He says “a painting is not alive if the painter has failed to master its k’ai-ho and ch’i-fu.”

B: I can see how “rising-falling” is important in Steir’s paintings, but what about “opening-closure”?

A: Possibly in the way your attention shifts back and forth between the two parts of each painting: as you focus on one side, it opens up, and simultaneously the other side closes. And maybe also in the way they oscillate between paint-as-paint surface and abstract space.  I think she has mastered s k’ai-ho and ch’i-fu.

B: After the “Wave” series Steir began painting waterfalls. How exactly does a  wave differ from a waterfall?

A: In nature a wave moves across a horizontal plane, while a waterfall occurs in a vertical plane, which means that Steir’s Waterfall paintings are literally waterfalls (or, to be precise, paint-turpentine-falls). The Wave paintings are depictions of waves; the Waterfall paintings are at once depictions and the thing itself, a kind of visual onomatopoeia. There’s a beautiful tautological relationship between process and image.

B: Like conceptual art?

A: That’s something she has been involved with, more deeply than many other painters. But the tautology of process and image isn’t crucial to the recent paintings.

B: Why?

A: Because they don’t present the viewer with an image that refers to something in the world, neither waterfalls nor waves nor rivers.

B: Rivers?

A: Like her Blue River (2005), a very big 37foot-long painting that was on view at the National Academy Museum last fall.

B: How would you explain Steir’s fascination with water?

A: Maybe it has something to do with China. To quote François Cheng again: in Chinese “the expression mountain-water means, by extension, the landscape and so landscape painting is called mountain and water painting.” Although Steir’s work doesn’t involve any calligraphy and doesn’t engage directly with the methods of Chinese ink painting, there are other ways in which her art feels close to those traditions.

B: Such as?

A: The idea of making the painting spontaneously, without any adjustments.  Steir has worked in different phases, but I think her work can be divided into a before and after with the break happening around 1989 when the first pure Waterfall paintings begin. Earlier in the decade she painted in a more conventionally Western mode; since then she has avoided anything that compromises the initial action.

B: Does she sometimes go back into the paintings?  Take Blue and Silver and Gold, for instance, the work we were just talking about. Didn’t she use a big rounded brush to rub into the silver side after she’d applied the paint?

A: Yes, though that’s very rare for her to do. (By the way, she subsequently added a pour of gold paint to that area.) These paintings don’t claim to be the result of sheer spontaneity, or a pure unmediated gesture. Nor do they rely on repeating the same formula again and again.  She is continually introducing different ways of handling paint, different kinds of relationships, like the splatters of gold paint that mark the right edge of Quantum—there’s nothing else like that in the exhibition.

B: Or the much more assertive physicality in Black, Blue, Silver and Gold. I find a disorienting sense of time and space in the distance between the splattering gold line on the right of edge of this painting and one of the fine blue lines on the left. It could be few feet or a thousand years.

A: The haptic presence of Black, Blue, Silver and Gold makes you aware of an ethereal quality in most of the other paintings. There’s a sense of void, loss, emptiness. Cheng quotes a Buddhist-inspired saying: “Color is emptiness; emptiness is color.” Forgive me for quoting from Empty and Full so often, but it’s one of the great books about painting written in recent years. Cheng worked closely with Jacques Lacan, and Empty and Full (first published as Vide et Plein in 1979) is a structural analysis of Chinese painting that looks at how philosophical Taoist ideas pervade Chinese painting. What is surprising given its original context (structuralism, Lacan) is how deeply it engages questions of spirituality. 

B: Doesn’t Pat Steir teach once a year at a Zen Buddhist monastery?

A: Yes, at the Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills.

B: Let’s return to the binary nature of her compositions.

A: I, too, want to understand why the artist presents us with two different color-space elements. How are we to look at them? Why two? And why two on one support, rather than made as a diptych?

B: Good question. Are we looking at division, at something split into two, or at a meditation on proximity, on two different things brought into relation to each other?

A: And why always a space between them, a gap or a line along the seam? Very different from what happens with Barnett Newman’s zips that can establish a figure/ground relationship. 

B: When Newman titled his first such painting Onement he emphasized the singularity of his vertical line and implied a metaphysical rebirth, the “new man” arising from the ashes of the Second World War. 

 A: Steir talks about Newman, especially in a long interview for the Archives of American Art. At one point she says that her November 2007 show at Cheim & Read was a “goodbye” to Newman’s work, and to Rothko’s, because she had completely stopped touching the canvas; all the paint was poured. In early Waterfall paintings the drips often resulted from a loaded brush hitting the canvas. (Interestingly, versions of this dripping brushstroke, at a much smaller scale, can already be seen in Steir’s early 1970s paintings.) 

B: Why do you think she started the Waterfall paintings circa 1989? Why then, and not earlier or later?

A: In 1980, Steir met John Cage. It took her some time to assimilate Cage’s Zen approach into her painting. Another crucial step was her exchange in 1982 with a former student of Cage’s, Stephen Addiss. Kay Larson writes about this encounter in her 2012 book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, describing how Steir’s misinterpretation of a Japanese calligraphic technique opened up new possibilities for her art. As Steir explained to Phong Bui in a 2011 Brooklyn Rail interview, “Stephen Addiss told me that thrown-ink painting began in the third century. I looked everywhere for it, I didn’t understand what it was because I couldn’t find it. That was because thrown ink meant broken line, not traditional painting. The artists didn’t actually throw the ink. I was influenced by the idea of throwing the ink but it was just a misunderstanding. I think a lot of art comes about through misunderstanding.” 

B: Another aspect worth noting is that the post-wave paintings engage with Abstract Expressionism more directly than anything she had done previously. 

A: Maybe by the end of the 1980s it seemed more viable  even necessary, to reconnect with Abstract Expressionism (albeit with a transgressive specificity of image) whereas in earlier decades many artists felt they had to establish their distance from it.

B: In Steir’s paintings there is an emptiness that never quite happens in historic Abstract Expressionist work, where the artist’ self is always foregrounded.

A: “One third fullness, two thirds emptiness” is a traditional precept in Chinese landscape painting.

B:  Chez Steir, it’s more like “three thirds fullness, three thirds emptiness.” One moment you are looking at layers of poured paint on a large stretched canvas, the next moment you are projected into a limitless space of atmospheric color.

B: The paintings are like the pages of an open book.

A: That’s an interesting comparison, given that the artist worked for over 10 years as a book designer.

B: And if these were pages of a book, what kind of writing would you expect find in them?

A: Perhaps some lines from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira l’hasard” (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance), where the poet evokes a shipwreck and an “abyss.” These are paintings in which a fragile vessel might flounder and vanish, and they can feel as vast and vertiginous as an abyss. The poem also includes a line that seems as if was written expressly for one of one of Steir’s paintings:  “the shadow enclosed in the depths by this alternative veil” (l’ombre enfouie dans la profoundeur par cette voile alternative).

B: Another reason that Mallarmé’s poem seems very apt for Steir’s paintings is because of how it spreads across two pages at a time, something no poet had ever done before. The reader of “Un Coup de Dés” is encouraged to shift attention in ways that are closer to looking at a painting than to conventional reading protocols. Like the French poet, Steir wants our attention to break free and cross back and forth between the facing rectangles, describing a potentially infinite number of lateral or diagonal trajectories. 

A: The new painting that seems closest to Mallarmé is Silver and White. By the way, this is another of the paintings where Steir intervened in seemingly autonomous process of the drips: near the top of the left side the silver paint was clumping so she sprayed it with some water and then used a brush to activate the flow. You can see traces of where the sprayed water hit the canvas. This contributes to the sense of something dissolving in the left half of the painting, while the right half is so much smoother and stable.

B: What about Small Blue One, a painting which isn’t so small, except in relation to Steir’s usual scale? It features two intense blues, combed through with densely packed silvery drips, and riven by a sharp red-orange line insulated by a current of silver paint. Wasn’t “l’Azur,” the blue sky, one of Mallarmé’s central images, his symbol of the ideal?

A: Yes, and he said it “haunted” him, always there, but unattainable. 

B: The idea of pairing Steir’s work with poetry isn’t as unusual as it sounds. In 2011 she and poet Anne Waldman collaborated on Cry Stall Gaze, an innovative double-scroll artist’s book where Waldman’s poems are actually superimposed over drawings by Steir.

A: In Chinese art, of course, poetry and painting are often indistinguishable.

B: As Su Shih (1037-1101) said: “When one savors Wang Wei’s poems, there are paintings in them;/When one looks at Wang Wei’s pictures, there are poems.” (I’m quoting from Early Chinese Texts on Painting, edited by Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih.)

A: Here’s another ancient quote (from Hsieh Ho in the fifth century): “Generate and give life to the rhythmic breath.” 

B: There are silent rhythms in Steir’s new paintings. How many breaths does it take, I wonder, to make a painting? Or to look at one? 

A: When your attention shifts from one side of a painting to the other you hold the breath of the first color. 

B: Then, as you encounter the second color(s), you exhale.

A: I see therefore I breathe.

B: Too Cartesian. 

A: I see and breathe?

B:  I see-breathe.