"I am the necessary  angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone..."  
"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" Wallace Stevens  

Art as Necessary Angel
Alana Keres

I'd like to break this to you gently friends,  but it is time you should know:  Art is not from around here.    "Here" is qualified as anywhere within Newton's universe--that  'man-locked set'  where acorns and asteroids fall at predictable velocities;  where all things are measured, made and appraised for the great, hungry mercado of unilinear time.  And where Ms. Entropy, along with the other harlots of Thermodynamics, are gonna getcha, getcha, getcha.    No, art is from somewhere, and quite possibly somewhen,  else.   This means that a fraction of the nonsense you were taught in Art History is true: the process of making  art is an act of abracadabra,  rooted in something-out-of-nothingness.  But  the blarney overflows the bucket when that process is converted into the meaning of a completed artwork.   You have seen it, and all too recently:  "The ambiguity of the indefinite is the accidental intention of Mr. BoringasHell's work."   The viewer is left, of course, to 'create your own meaning.'  

This simply shows that a) the people describing the work do not have the first idea of where it comes from, and b) are too habituated to their Newtonian reflexes to go find out.    Well, in all fairness, there is c) prowling around as well:  most of us (dealers, critics, curators, collectors and even some artists) are trained to scrutinize the artifacts of the art--from social, aesthetic and historical influences to material and techniques, as if amassing this data  can somehow reveal the truth of the work.  

And amassing we will go.  With storage capacities now expanded to googleplexpie-proportions, our encyclopedias of circumstance grow mountainous, and as the Tel Quel have pointed out (with typical French humility) endlessly referential, producing the odious intellectual habit of careening through those slippery signifiers into the pit of 'ambiguity.'   That's not the worst of it: given our bulging databases, even the question,  'What is the meaning of a work of art?'  seems at once quaint and scandalous.   But perhaps no more than the answer: art is what it does.   It is this direct, even primal, relationship between being and doing  that makes every art object mantic; that is, embedded in a matrix of powers inaccessible to the informatically-trained mind.   While the matrix may not be accessible, the art object is; and it's mission, should we care to accept it, is to get us into the same room with some of those powers.     

*** What we do when we get there depends on the particular set-up of our sensory array.    If our lead sensibility is  vision, then hearing or touch is the back-up system, providing verification through the secondary channel.   It is the separation and flow  between the senses that delimits our experience, holding what something is  in one cell of attention while we interrogate what it does  in another.   As a tribe, artists are not uniformly synaesthetic, but it is safe to say that they exist at a higher level of overlap than the rest of us.    

Overlap between the senses becomes integration in the studio.     Whether an art object makes an appeal, a demand or leaves you cold is not simply a matter of 'subjectivity' (a term that died in its cocoon years ago).  We respond to  the  sensory integration  embodied in that object if --and only if-- it comes close to our own rhythms of attention.   

For example, an art lover whose path through the world is primarily tactile may be drawn through a lavish impasto or a silken finish into a  secondary visual domain, opening touch to the realm of tonality.      What calls may be the lure of the tactile, but what answers is the dynamic between vision and touch.    

If artwork draws us into a realm between the senses, so what?   Is art just another neurotropic braincandy, with effects not unlike oxygen deprivation or a few minutes with a Coen Brothers movie?   And if comprehension of a work is no more than a matter of some twilit morphogenic symmetry, what happens to the criteria for excellence?    Beyond it's intrasensory realm, art has a number of secondary functions: educating, healing, protecting, creating identity and inspiration.  Excellence can be measured to the extent that a work carries out one or more of these functions.   But the power to do so is based on a nuclear activity in the studio:  the gradual disappearance of the membrane between what the art (artist) is and what it (s/he) does.  Don't misunderstand me--I'm not referring to the discovery of some steady-state, cosmic 'unity,'  but rather to a waltz-time convergence where disparate themes, ideas, images become consonant to one another, even as the artist becomes consonant to her medium.  According to the success of this dynamic, the artwork is imbued with a corresponding radiance -- which passes into the world, seeking its image in the person who will love it.   

***
"So Mom, just how far is infinity, anyway?"  Trent Tate, age six, decides to break his lifelong silence with a question.  The ensuing investigation  led to seasonal journeys along the Yellowstone river,  mountain-climbing ventures, a recurrent stint as the cowhand/artist at a working ranch in Montana.   And, since 1997, into the arcane world of painting with egg tempera.  

If you're going to size up infinity, outside is a good place to look.   Tate's images are drawn from the countryside, and a long, thoughtful write-up in Southwest Art  last year gives the impression that he is a Western painter.      But to call these works 'landscape' might be pushing it a little;  this is no Jimmy Jalapeeno swarming the paper with smooth water under tangled oak.   Tate's work has a few conspicuous elements:  the tree, a high horizon, its sky empty as a bell; sometimes a bird or a horse, and when possible, the moon.    Each item disposed to give the others a luminous autonomy.   

 "Not November"  a painting in the sanctuary of the gallery, starts to get at the other infinity.   It's true title --about 30 words long-- describes the exorbitant vision that sometimes opens in us when we think we are asleep.  Impersonal as a surveillance camera, but weirdly comprehensive -- as if the dreaming eye becomes a spherical hand, holding the entire horizon.     

My scrutiny of  the painting quickly became looking through that eye; though it took  a few minutes to realize that I was standing almost inside one of those 'matrices.'   What tipped me off was the utterly implausible spatial configuration of the "Not November" horizon:  though an unsurprising convexity bowed the earthline, the sky falls back, billowing like a great transparent sail, which in turns makes the ground read as concave.    And then it isn't, but then it is.  I studied the brushwork, recognizing several tricks that created this mobius effect,  which persisted, completely undeterred by my critique, until I withdrew my attention from the painting.   Back in the room, I was glad to find the rest of the earth still flat... but ever-so-slightly more infinite.   

***

The cognitive border between  the image of something, i.e., what it is, and the description of what it does is heavily patrolled in our ordinary, waking world.    Trent Tate  (who is also a writer) effaces that border as much as he can, using captions that are almost perfectly cryptic -- wordforms that fit into the image of the painting, but do not disturb its essential mystery.     

Sydney Yeager, on the other hand, has simply obliterated that boundary in the last few years.     Her works from 1992 to 2002 are on tour in a show entitled "Little Mysteries"   -- and though it is a small timespan as retrospectives go, the  remarkable evolution of her work certainly merits wider exposure.     

Yeager's work, like Tate's,  has a few recurrent icons, but there the resemblance ends.   Unlike Tate's pellucid realism, Yeager's parentheses, gloves, and scissors depicted  at the beginning of the 90's are embedded in complicated fields of color, a palette of chinaberry yellows and parched  earthtones.  As the decade unfolds, the icons dissolve into calligraphic lines.  The parenthetical brackets drew closer, finally sealing themselves into a series of ovals that grow ever more eye-halting, holding one part of the gaze at the surface while other images float up and away, unraveling as they go. 

Yeager's palette became more lively by the end of the nineties,  extending into blues and gentian violets,  while the ova began to move more freely around the canvas.  By 2001 the oval had hatched a new language.  The delicate, sino-arabic whorls of "Message" (1998) are birthed  again as an incendiary script, one that needed no lexicon.   Entire canvases were written in this tongue, unfurling in heavy, luxurious, subtle waves.    If Tate explores infinity, the incalculable space between one moment and another, Yeager probes definity, the irrepressible codes and contingencies through which all creation takes (and makes) place.         




Coda:  
My friend Brian and I had just wandered through "22 to Watch,"  AMOA director Dana Friis-Hanson's first curatorial offering to the city.  Walking outside into the din of midday Congress Avenue, I asked, "Did you see anything you liked?"   "Lots."   "Was any of it art?"  "How would I know?"  he laughed.   "Okay," I said, turning on my heel, "let's go back in..."   We took another spin through the exhibit, Brian pointing out the subtle jokes and a few textures that caught his attention.   "Does anything inspire you?"  I prodded him.   

He shrugged.  The word  'inspire' had a curiously limp feel to it, as if it had been used over and over to mop up a messy idea.    Hmmm.  "What I mean is, did you see anything that made you want to make something else?"  "Oh yes!" he exclaimed, tugging me over to a painting near the entrance.   He talked for a minute about its chromatic clarity, and the way that the viewpoint both disoriented and excited him.   "So what do you think of it?" he concluded.   "It's a good work, but I'm not going to critique it.  I just wanted to make sure that you ran into at least one thing that had the viral effect on you, that is, made you slightly feverish to get back to your own creative space.   That, my friend, is the angel of art. "     

 ###