For I is some one else. If brass wakes up as a bugle, it is no fault of its own. That is obvious to me: I am present at the hatching of my thought. —Rimbaud
Title and work
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
—Shakespeare
I will begin with a very recent, exemplary painting: Pondlife (2010). In the first place I am struck – as so often with Frank Bowling’s work – by the evocative title, at once seeming celebratory (of the natural) and ironic (being a term of mild abuse, a demotic misappropriation of something intrinsically interesting and beautiful). It is in fact an abstract painting created without premeditation of any such kind of evocation or reference, and its title is arbitrary, even whimsical: it might have been something quite other. (This in itself carries a hint of irony in the relation of work to spectator: you want a title? I will give you a title: how about Pondlife?) The title hints nevertheless – just -- at description, and yet it is open to possibilities of poetic ambiguity, as is the picture itself.
Frank Bowling, Pondlife, 2010
Acrylic on canvas, 57 x 51 inches
The one-word contraction is a poet’s device, suggesting that the watery space which we are invited by the central panel to imagine is in itself an enclosed world-entire, in a condition of interactive being, dynamic, fluid, a world in which the discrete lives of the plants and creatures that inhabit it – as spatter and speckle, paint-stain and combed flow of acrylic gel - are at one with their aquatic element, simultaneously separating and coalescing, in dynamic suspension between becoming and entropy.
This is how poetic suggestion works, and I am reminded that Bowling as a young man set out to become a poet and to study literature: his titles have always given license to his love of word-play. Bowling is aware of the title as the subtle hinge which attaches a painting to the world beyond its edges and surfaces, the world of imaginative response, reflective thought and natural language. The title is in this sense the first contact the painting makes with the wider critical and historical discourse. (Withholding a title, besides making life difficult for historians, is itself a way of determining aspects of the first round of critical response.)
While acknowledging that abstract painting might want to admit into its ambit of effect and affect the power of the poetic allusion, Bowling has never, in his paintings after 1972, extended this to any kind of mimetic figuration or sign- making, however ghostly or subliminal. In the paintings prior to that date - a period that culminated in his one-person show of the abstract ‘map paintings’ at the Whitney in 1971 – it was just such use of the map-sign, as a vague emanation or a fading cipher, that had drawn critical and public attention to his paintings as carrying, like flags, some kind of political implication, and as having affinities with Pop.
But Bowling has always made cunning and witty use of titles: he knows that a title may be intriguingly enigmatic or helpfully allusive; it may be anecdotal, celebrating or commemorating a person or an event, whether trivial or momentous; it may summon to mind a myth or legend; it may prompt a recollection of things past; it may refer to a natural phenomenon, a place or an effect of light. A title may also, of course, deflect immediate associations of a colour, form or texture in order to free the observer’s mind to imaginative invention. In these ways his titles are very like those we often encounter in modern jazz, another abstract modernist art, a number of which Bowling has knowingly and pointedly appropriated or adapted.
It might seem, in pondering Pondlife (and its title), that I have hitherto have been concentrating solely on that band of richly worked canvas, its surface agitated, which is stitched and stuck on to the larger thinly-painted canvas which supports it. But in fact it is easy to see how the atmospheric parallels of translucent pink and green acrylic-wash might in themselves be seen as an invitation to the ambiguities of the title: the impression they give is of an untroubled watery surface catching the evening sun.
The simultaneous sensations as of peering into depth (into the hectic self-contained world of the sewn strip) and of scanning an illuminated aqueous surface receding into the distance remind me of Monet’s exploitation of the same simultaneity – a vertiginous sensory ambivalence - in Les Nympheas, those great paintings of pond life. Such a recollection of the late work of Monet (which is not of immediate resemblance but of resemblances of effect) is not infrequent in contemplating Bowling’s painting, bringing with it always the implications of a critical conflict between an art of associative impressions (of objective natural phenomena, say, or of feelings of awe or wonder) and that of a purely abstract objectivity of the kind advocated by Clement Greenberg as truly ‘modernist’ painting.
Paintings and their histories
The poet makes himself a seer by a long and systematic derangement of all the senses.
—Rimbaud
That complexity of effect, in which our viewing of a painting veers between the perception of naturalistic effects in the picture, and our apprehension of a surprising and beautiful object – the painting itself - in our immediate world, is one that Bowling achieves without fail, in different ways, in all his later paintings. The powerful contradiction of image and object is not entirely unlike the effect of early Jasper Johns, where the common sign disappears from mind, so to speak, in the face of a rich tactile complexity of facture, the objective physicality of the work as a whole. As in the paintings here, it is a facture that suggests no effort at self-expression; rather, a kind of objectivity.
In respect of this, there is an aspect of Pondlife which serves to give it a particular historical poignancy. For the canvas on which is laid the ground (for want here of a more accurate term) of pale purple, pink and green translucencies, an ambience of light created by lightly-brushed thinned acrylic, is in fact recycled (in a process habitual to Bowling’s practice) from an earlier, abandoned painting, of 1972. That was the year in which Bowling came to know Greenberg, and during which, through a kind of Socratic dialogue with the younger artist (Bowling was in his mid-thirties) the critic subtly opened up a critical-creative space within which Bowling found that he could move beyond an art of direct reference or overt symbolism (of the kind indicated by the stencilled images of his mother’s house and hemispheric maps) to a formalist abstraction that freed him from any kind of quasi-political identity not of his own choosing.
It may be said, in passing, that for Bowling the espousal of a non-referential, non-symbolic formalism was in fact a crucial moral act: ‘Formalist art … is almost always hard on itself and indulges in rigorous self-criticism, within the given discipline alone’ he wrote in May 1972. ‘[the] practice of painting within the boundaries of Formalism provides a setting in which I am able to test and ultimately prove my own freedom.’ These words closely echo in spirit those of Greenberg in his classic 1961 essay defining ‘Modernist Painting’, in which a purist (and puritan) definition of formalist abstraction is provided with great clarity.
‘It quickly emerged that what the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of the medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered ‘pure’, and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. ‘Purity’ meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.’
Frank Bowling, Amelia, 2004
Mixed media on canvas, 14 x 13-1/4 inches
The juxtaposition in Pondlife of two distinct styles, one sampled, as it were, from an earlier music, has implications at once ironic and nostalgic. It is ironic, in that a beautiful and moving object has been created with deliberative procedures, objective craft, and arbitrary, even automatic, decisions; but it is an object made without premeditation of its eventual appearance and effect. Bowling could not know that he would see possibilities of allusion suggested by a title given post facto. And the incorporation of strips and fragments cropped from earlier work was to be an enduring creative ploy: see in the present exhibition Amelia (2004) Alighting, Hovering, Vines (all 2010).
That the new painting as a whole retrieves (as memory may be said to retrieve) material that belongs to the innocent and earnest purity of his earlier formalist intentions brings nostalgic resonance. It is a visible remembrance of his briefly-held ambition, under the immediate influence of Greenberg, to succeed as a post-painterly colour-field abstractionist. A handful of beautiful paintings survive from 1972-73 as proof of that success. But intention in Bowling’s procedures does not extend to the allusive or affective. He works close to the surface, close to the materials of his art. After ‘the long and systematic dérèglement’ of the working process, the magician-seer steps back and - voila! - Pondlife!
Procedures to make paintings; paintings to generate images
Nature is not mechanical…. Its prodigy is not identity but resemblance and its universe of reproduction is not an assembly line but an incessant creation. Because this is so in nature, it is so in metaphor. Nor are we talking of imitation.
—Wallace Stevens
Immersed as he was in the painting culture of New York in the late 1960s and 1970s (as a critic-polemicist as well as a painter whose acquaintance extended beyond the milieu of abstract painting) Bowling was keenly aware of the theoretical discussion that animated the studios, apartments and bars inhabited or frequented by the painters of the time. He became increasingly aware of the ways in which these technical aspects of a painting might add complexity to a work and its reception. He had always worked, and continued to do so thereafter, with an intense critical reflexivity, a consciousness of relations between different aspects of a work, and between the painting itself and other paintings, his own or those of other artists, past and present. This self-consciously critical aspect is always visible in Bowling’s paintings as a kind of meta-subject. It is part of the experience, part of the fun.
‘Modernism’, as Greenberg had observed, characteristically ‘criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticised.’ So it is not surprising that soon after his experiments with colour-field Bowling looked for other ways, less indebted to Newman and Rothko, in which to create an imagery that not only eliminated personal touch and signature, but were less easily read as pictorial and atmospheric. Thin-wash acrylic fields, translucent, diaphanous, cannot but evoke pictorial space and induce mood. Bowling became increasingly concerned, however, to create brilliant objects rather than beautiful images.
In a competitive environment, Bowling was working now with a keen awareness of the inexpressive ‘post-painterly’ procedures of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons and Jules Olitski. Pouring, spraying, staining, masking, cropping, screening, applications of acrylic gel, un-stretched canvases, shaped supports; acrylic paint applied with openness of design and a self-declarative clarity of execution: these were the technical and stylistic characteristics of much of the most critically successful New York abstract painting. Bowling’s own response to the challenge of ‘modernist’ formalism, to forgo the ‘expressive touch’, to discover a new reality in painting-as-painting (in what the early Russian abstractionists he admired would have called ‘painting-as-such’) was extreme.
The poured paintings of the mid-‘70s were created by means of a mechanical device of Bowling’s own invention: a tilting board-platform, whose angle of tilt could be controlled by pegs at each end, and which allowed the paint to flow downwards over the stretched canvas at a determined speed, its velocities susceptible to adjustment. In effect the painting made itself with a minimum of assistance from the painter. In their thrilling unpredictability, and their vertiginous disposition of the pure materials of their art, these poured paintings have about them something very close to the free-form excitement of contemporaneous advanced New York jazz, itself a brilliant manifestation of the Modernist spirit. ‘The inventions of the unknown’ wrote Rimbaud, ‘demand new forms.’
What gives these objects their extraordinary power, their startling visual impact, is another kind of unpredictability altogether. They are images of the natural processes which made them what they are. They cannot therefore avoid resemblance to other phenomena whose forms and effects are created by similar dynamics. The titles Bowling has given to the poured paintings, it seems to me, fall into the category of those intended to deflect immediate associations, to emphasise that they are in no way descriptive, and that any resemblance they may have to other things (natural things) is unpremeditated, most certainly not intentional. But ‘the mind, the mind has mountains’: the receiving imagination will work as it will, its play over things – involuntary and involuntary - determined by association, the perception of similarity, memory and desire.
‘[The] resemblance between things’ said the great American poet Wallace Stevens, ‘… [is] one of the significant components of the structure of reality.’ ‘Resemblance’ may exist, as Wallace suggests, not only between two or more parts of reality (as one waterfall resembles all others) but also ‘between something real and something imagined or, what is the same thing, between something imagined and something real as, for example, between music and whatever may be evoked by it’. Thus a resemblance may be found between an inner feeling (a thrill, a mood) and an outward object (in this case a painting); or we may perceive a resemblance between a painting such as Courteous Shade (1974), Sunkist or 13th Hour (both 1976) and a natural phenomenon such as a fire or a waterfall; or we may see a similarity between a poured painting and a representational painting. I have mentioned Monet; now I may say that these paintings bring to my mind the beautiful light-falls and waterfalls of Frederick Edwin Church.
Bowling had devised a method of painting that would create, he may have thought, sensational effects, but the neutrality of the pouring mechanism and the natural dynamics of gravity would eliminate the stroke and the mark, the disposition of paint on canvas as indices of personal expression. It was a technique that made possible what might be termed ‘controlled automatism’. (Those adjusting pegs, like those of a stringed instrument, allowed variations of pitch. Bowling could not renounce the temptations of melody.) Although it could be infinitely productive, the method was limited in its formal outcomes.) However spectacular the individual effects of colour, of the mix of the chromatic and tonal, of the speed of flow and the density of texture, the generic resemblance of one such poured painting to another predicated a need to develop and change.
Bowling nevertheless carried over into his later work the objective free-form cool of this approach to the making of paintings: improvisation in search of effect; effect to match vision and generate feeling in the spectator. Like his free-jazz contemporaries and their great post-war predecessors, he was seeking grandeur and grace, wit and sonority: the expression of the medium not the performer; reverberations from elsewhere in the immediacy of now. The wonderful constellation paintings of the early ‘80s, such as Ah Susan Whoosh (1981), Odysseus' Footfall and Round Midnight Last Night (both 1982), with their wheeling galaxies and shadowy moons, demonstrate a rapid and dramatic progression to the mastery of the varied techniques and procedures that were to serve Bowling’s purposes from that time on.
It occurs to me that the contradiction, ‘controlled automatism’, is as good a description of Bowling’s primary creative methodology as we are likely to find. It applies to the whole repertoire of his techniques and procedures. In every case there are elements of choice: of scale, colour, secondary materials, quantities of medium, etc. There is frequently evidence of design decisions: the stitching on of chromatic colour strips and borders, red, blue, yellow, green; painted stripes as in Kite Eye (2002); and in the latest paintings the purposeful central ‘zipper’ device and the deliberate placement of arcs and circles. As in Cybele’s Yellow Door to Fishes and Scott’s Eyetooth (both 1982) there are often underlying quasi-geometric forms and structures; in many paintings these are provided by strips of acrylic foam, attached to the canvas at the outset of painting. These are all instances of evident control and determination, but in every case the image presented by the completed painting is unpremeditated.
The complicated surfaces of Bowling’s later paintings are aspects of work done one move at a time. They are the outcome of diverse processes and procedures: chemical fusing and dissipations of pigment, refractive and reflective layerings of acrylic gel (as subtle in their refinements of the image as the applications of varnish to nineteenth century landscape paintings), embeddings of foam-strip and found objects, stitched and glued collaged borders and frames of stained textile. The total image, immediate as it is, has been created slowly and carefully out of a succession of discrete actions, retractions, cancellations, reflections, additions and subtractions. A process of contemplation, of willed chance and arbitrary interventions creates unexpected relativities and syntheses, ambiguities of space, contrasts of light and darkness, modulations of colour, optical and textural complexities. Each painting presents an enthralling spectacle of simultaneities, an image coterminous with the beautiful and complex object which carries it.
Mel Gooding Barnes July 2010
(Mel Gooding is a well-known British writer on art and architecture. He has written extensively on abstract painting, including Abstract Art (2001) for the Tate series ‘Movements in Modern Art’. He is the author of monographs and essays on artists as diverse as Frank Auerbach, Patrick Caulfield, John Hoyland, Gillian Ayres, Robert Motherwell and Pierre Soulages. He is current writing a book on Frank Bowling, to be published by Royal Academy Publications in 2011.)
Notes and references: Rimbaud is quoted in each case from the seminal letter to Paul Demeny, 15th May, 1871. Wallace Stevens discusses ‘resemblance’ in the first of his ‘Three Academic Pieces’ (The Necessary Angel, London, Faber and Faber, 1960; first published in Partisan Revew in 1947). Clement Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ was first published by Arts Yearbook, no 4, 1961 (New York). Frank Bowling’s statement is from ‘Problems of Criticism’, Arts Magazine, New York, May, 1972. |
