THE HOLES IN
MERLIN JAMES
(Shades of Gray on the Richter Scale)
Brent Sikkema
530 W 22nd Street
New York NY 10011
By
DAVID COHEN
Merlin James's
studio in London,
all images courtesy
Brent Sikkema Gallery, New York
"I like the hole thing",
a visitor to the Merlin James exhibition was overheard saying to the
artist at Brent Sikkema Gallery on opening night. James's odd-ball little
canvases are often pierced through, with varying degrees of restraint,
exposing the wall behind (the gaping hole in the painted wall of A
Courtyard), or intimating some dark presence (the discrete tear,
reading almost as a painterly mark, in Goats in the Foro Traiano).
"The whole thing", James jested in response, "Why,
thank you!". A play with language, the discovery of double entendre,
self-deprecation thinly disguised as a bravura gesture, are as typical
of the paintings as of their painter. And like the whole, the holes
which are its part are redolent of multi-layeredness -much, indeed,
as a hole literally cuts through and yet accentuates a surface.
As in Henry Moore, the apertures in
Merlin James manage at once to be a functioning formal device and an
invitation to psychological speculation. As a modernist strategy, the
Jamesian hole acts as a kind of reverse collage. But James is hardly
the new Fontana. His punctures, like indeed his collage elements, the
hair and other stuff layered into the paint, are more suggestive than
axiomatic. Another overheard viewer at the opening (another commentator
upon the openings) poetically muttered how these pictures "are
already damaged", an insight which captures the essence of his
project. For James wants his painting to relate to tradition, and yet
he manages to invest it with a melancholy air, stranding it in the present.
The held-back quality, the wistful imagery, the visible unease, the
angst about expressivity, the critical self-consciousness of these pictures,
all point to a difficult birth, as if by caesarian.
Merlin James was born in Wales in
1960. He is of the generation, though anything but the temperament,
of the YBAs. Against the prevailing "dumb conceptualist" ethos,
he is that exquisitely rare thing, an artist both cerebrally and emotionally
invested. He is perhaps as well known on both sides of the Atlantic
for his writings about art as he is for his own painting. He is read
in the Burlington Magazine, Art in America, the Times Literary Supplement,
and in catalogues devoted to the artists he has championed, who include
Derain, Soutine, Helion, Sickert, Lowry, and - rarely, for him, a contemporary
painter, Alex Katz. He is literally an Alex Katz "professor",
for in the first half of this year he held, as its first encumbent,
the Alex Katz Chair in Painting endowed at Cooper Union by that School's
illustrious alumnus. The lecture coming from that residency, recently
published by Cooper under the title, "Painting Per Se",
is a polemical plea for medium specificity, an argument for nuance and
against a fashionable blurring of boundaries which leaves painting stranded
as just another option within the bigger category of visual art. Noting,
towards the end of his talk, how the muses "were the daughters
of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who was Memory", he celebrates the fact
that each art form had its own muse, that "there were already varieties
- categories - at the very source of creativity". He then muses
with Merlinian wizardry as to why the arts are born of memory, how it
is the job of art to commemorate, and to block the forgetting of eternal
truths. "But also," he continues, "I like to think that
memory is the mother of the Muses because any form of creativity- any
art form- requires a continual internalization of its own tradition,
an ever-present consciousness of its past… Each painting contains
the memory of painting."
Merlin James Goats in
the Foro Traiano 2000-2001,
oil on canvas, 44 x 63 cm
Merlin James Via dei Bardi
2001
oil on canvas, 42 x 51 cm
If painting contains the memory of
itself, as memory lapses, plays its tricks, opens up lesions, and clouds
over with nostalgia and other projections, the painter must creatively
fill the holes that result. All the while, new forms generate new memories.
A recent memory for anyone in New
York who follows art was that assault on painterly consciousness, the
Gerhard Richter exhibition, which closed the Modern (which has embarked
on several years of major renovations and decamped to Queens) ten days
before James's opened. To the casual observer it might seem that the
younger painter is more a protégé of Richter's than of
Katz's. Both Richter and James, after all, treat us to a painterly reworking
each of a Milan landmark. The nonchalently smudged monochrome of Richter's
touristic snapshot image of Milan Cathedral recalls the quirky late
works, taken from press clippings, by Walter Richard Sickert (a Jamesian
hero) as Sandford Schwarz perceptively remarked in the pages of the
New York Review of Books. While Richter famously reworks photography,
James is more famous for transcribing old masters: he once exhibited
fifty drawings after a Poussin at the National Museum of Wales propped
against a wall opposite the original. It is all the more disconcerting,
therefore, that he has adopted a set of vintage photographs as the source
for all his images in his current body of work. These mid-ninteenth
century records of artistic sites and historic landmarks in Italy are
the product of Fratelli Alinari Fotografi Editori, a photographic agency
founded in Florence in 1854 which provided the plates for many standard
reference works of the following half-century.
Richter and James are both painters
whose work is, at a fundamental level, about painting. But a contrast
in attitude and affect could not be more pointed than it is between
these two artists. Note how so many in James's modern pantheon, from
Sickert and Morandi to [William] Nicholson, [Gwen] John, and Alex Katz,
are "painters' painters"; they all figure in an almost unwritten,
secret history-within-the-history of painting. His rapport with them
could not be more opposite than Richter's deconstructive alienation
from the "greats" morbidly lampooned in his 48 Portraits,
1971-72, a series of copies of encyclopedia portraits. Cold, clever,
formal, official Herr Richter is, surely, the anti-painting person's
painter. He was in deadly earnest when he announced, in 1966, that he
preferred many amateur snapshots to the best painting by Cézanne.
Richter images are about the impossibility of painting per se, even
while revelling in painterly tricks. Having his cake and eating it.
Richter indulged a fluxus-dada denigration of painting even while ingratiating
the walls of the very bourgeoisie he sought to épate with his
"capitalist realism".
James's choice of images, and more
to the point, what he then does with them, and how the source images
function subsequently, belongs to an entirely different order of aesthetic
experience. Firstly, the photos are not chanced upon banalities; they
are images treasured for their artistry. Alinari brothers, indeed, disemminated
photographs as acutely conscious of "the memory of painting"
as many a contemporaneous painting. For when photography was a new medium,
with empty accounts in the memory bank, it borrowed from older image
making media well into funds. Meanwhile, its technical presence forced
the painterly heirs of painting to look afresh at nature, as if through
a camera. Photography aped painting tradition just as the American nation-builders
aped Tory Englishness.
James retains the melancholy of the
deadpan image with an almost Chiricoesque intensity. But there is no
tricksy approximation of sepia tones or painterly imitations of camera
shake. Indeed, there is no explicit need for the viewer of his paintings
to know that they are based on photographs, though to do so is to add
a layer, not to peel one away. The photograph is the starting point
in a construction of a painterly image calling for color, texture, gesture,
stroke, puncture, collage, all to give affect to its achievement. Looking
at an Alinari print is like looking through a camera oscura:
a meaning-laden reduction. But rather than cruelly discarding the Alinari
images once used, James gives them new life. It is surely telling, meanwhile,
that now his images are so explicity not "from life", but
derived from the nature morte that is photography, they are more populated
than ever, by people, camels, goats.
James paints as if his highest aim
is to be a painters' painter: his images are deliberately murky, obscure,
strange, private, poetic, small, ambiguous- fragments shored against
his ruin. His new show at Sikkema, however, betrays a newfound generosity
towards medium and touch; there is still the intentional deadpan of
acrylic, as he shuns the easy-won lushness of oil, and an affection
for the artifice of art-school color. But, in the phrase of F.R.Leavis,
an appropriate critic to cite in relation to a painter so concerned
with medium specificity, he is "learning to be spontaneous".
Maybe, at the end of the day, James
and Richter are exercised by the same angst. But Richter's solution
is nihilism where James's is empathy. Richter will only paint in quotation
marks, yo-yo-ing from phoney abstraction to anal photo-realism, with
a "Ho Ho" as he does so. James actually paints, all the while
conscious of the probable absurdity of it, as if propounding an argument
which he knows has a gaping hole in it, but animated by a conviction
deeper than logic, a faith.
I had the privilege, some months ago,
to join a private tour of the Richter with its curator, Robert Storr
(who is not moving with Moma to Queens but is joining the faculty at
NYU instead; a tremendous loss to the Modern). Anyhow, I couldn't help
but chuckle inwardly when Rob anounced that Richter's turgid gray squiggles
from the early 1970s, his aptly titled "Un-Paintings", were
in "dialogue" with the contemporaneous white abstractions
of Robert Ryman. "Where's Ryman's half of the 'dialogue', Rob?"
I should have heckled. One cannot dialogue in un-painting; un-painting
is inherently solipsistic. Whereas one of the joys of Merlin James,
I find, is its constant generosity towards the possibilities raised
by all sorts of other painting. James's reticence is about self-denial,
not viewer-denial. The exquisite near-monochrome Windmill (White)
2001, indeed, brings Robert Ryman into an unlikely conversation
with Rembrandt van Ryn, with Merlin James as interpreter.
Merlin James Milano 2002
oil on canvas, 24 x 28 cm
Merlin James Windmill
(White) 2001
oil on canvas, 42 x 49 cm
