PHILIP GUSTON’S LAST LAUGH
By Jennifer Reeves
All during a night
Of anxiety I wait
At last the dawn comes
Through the cracks of the shutters,
Heartless as night
the Monk Shun-e
Pain plays the paperweight on Philip Guston’s desk. Keeps things tidy. Only problem is the papers continue to pile up. There isn’t quite enough excruciation to hold them down. Just when the end seems imminent, when all desire to keep going collapses, a veiny arm from heaven comes from above to draw a line. Ideas for paintings, like papers, like arms from the laborious on high, fill the office to brimming. Billions of files packed with possibility swirl in a maze between two ears. In order to gain control of this disaster, try buying more file cabinets. Stuff the garbage cans to capacity. Get rid of the memories, the reasons to die and the reasons to live. Wish for luck getting the can lids to stay on because they won’t. The papers will still pile up. They will pile up because someone with a thumping chest works in there.
And that’s what grand hearts do. They thump. They thump through the night of anxiety into the harsh light of day. It makes no difference where the sun happens to be. Either way, night or day, existence is heartless. Life presents us with a pyramid and a big shoe. It’s a hill to climb or a kick in the ass. And enough to make a person want to stay in bed forever. But who can sleep with that damn clock ticking? Or is that a tapping foot? Might as well stop staring at the bottle of wine on the table and get to work. Time’s-a-wastin’. Watching a spider build a web of apathy from table to chair to book begins to bore. It’s nothing more than a will to die. Papers pile up. Ideas clog the arteries. Another second of waiting will split the veins and cause a spill. Paint a picture of a blank canvas. Is it a promise of action or a condemnation of inaction? Get up. Pick up the brush. Turn on the light. Get to work. So what if another wound sprouts from your head. Just stick another band-aid on. Necessity unfolds a pantheon to live out. Oh, Giotto, Tiepolo, de Chirico, Piero. How I love you.
Your fine promises
Were like the dew of life
To a parched plant,
But now the autumn
Of another year goes by.
Fujiwara No Mototoshi
Philip Guston didn’t reject sublimity. He got tired of it. Screw "all that purity," he said. Get busy grappling with gritty questions. Questions like, what’s a boy to do when dad is dead and only God is left for comfort? Oh yes, the beauty of God may be found in the expressiveness of paint and maybe there is sustenance there. Yes. But, beautiful expression is only one part of the whole picture. There’s also an ugly story of cause and effect. Causes like, finding your father swinging from a rope. Effects like, incessant urges to swing from a rope too. What’s a boy to do? Bring dad back? Heal dad’s sorrow? It’s too late. There’s nothing to be done. There will be no justice. Death is final. He won’t come back. He won’t be there. Not now, not in the future. Not when mom stares frozen at the window, not when you decide to quit school, not when you give your first lecture to students, not when your brother loses his legs, not when you marry a soft-spoken poet. He will not be there. Not in the bad times and not in the good. Not ever. There will be no change. There will be no justice. It’s over. He’s gone. And you want to die, too.
There are reasons for things. For great artists there are underlying reasons for everything in a painting…no matter the degree of absurdity involved. It wasn’t a swing set that stuck in Guston’s mind. It was a noose. It wasn’t a vase of flowers the artist included on his "Painter’s Table." It was an iron, a shoe, a tack, and a book. For Guston the story, the symbolism, is key. He had specific questions to ask. Why in particular is the iron instead of, say, a teapot on the painter’s table? Why the iron? Sure, he used an iron to straighten wrinkled canvas. Yes, the iron happened to be there in his studio. But, it wasn’t just there. It was THERE. It was present in the way irons are usually not. It occupied space in the way a favorite writer of Guston’s, Isaac Babel, described when he said, "No iron can enter the heart like a period in the right place." Or there’s nothing so just as a mirror that doesn’t lie, that doesn’t gloss over the pain, that tells the truth in the way the truth happened. Maybe telling the truth is the same as acknowledging beauty and ugliness simultaneously. Indeed, Guston found beauty, perhaps even justice, in the surface quality of paint, in the scrumptious shadow play over light pinks, in the sensual joy of living. That’s a fact. He had that strength. Yet, he also had another asset. He couldn’t ignore suffering.
I should not have waited.
It would have been better
To have slept and dreamed,
Than to have watched night pass,
And this slow moon sink.
Lady Akasome Emon
Philip Guston couldn’t ignore suffering and he couldn’t ignore the indifferences resulting in suffering. He saw humanity’s depravity both universally and personally. He was a societal-self-reflective painter. Here, however, the question arises: can abstraction include beauty and suffering, justice and injustice as effectively as representational work? Well, yes, but to answer a question with a question, does every artist have to do it that way? Absolutely not. There are myriad ways to be deeply expressive. After all, do not all roads lead to Rome? Why should Philip’s path be exactly like Jackson’s? The journeys themselves, whether abstract or representational, are less interesting to consider than are the way the traveler traversed them. Even more interesting is whether or not the intended destination was reached or, better yet, worth reaching. What was it Shakespeare said? "Comparisons are odorous" (note that he said odorous not odious). So, comparisons stink. They smell to high heavens. And they happen to smell up the art world. Big time. So let’s stop expecting Guston to be an extension of Pollock or even vice versa. To be just, to judge righteous judgment, artists must be taken to task by the degree of excellence with which they follow their personal pathways, that is, their accomplished courage. Guston knew, and DeKooning reportedly seconded it, that abstract and representational methodologies are essentially in the same boat. In either case, "things," whether objects or brushstrokes aren’t wedded to appearances. In moments of insight, irons are more than irons and marks than marks. Intelligibility returns from its seeming absence according to the marrow of the brushstrokes or their imbedded attitudes in evidence. Anything else is literal ignoring suffering and enabling the merely illustrative.
The painter of Klansmen refused to rely on literal means to escape pain. He acknowledged suffering in the abstract as well as in the representational with felt aesthetics. Once he mastered abstraction, he took on the figurative by letting his demons out. These demons take the form of senseless guys throwing bricks and stuffing bodies into garbage cans all the while leisurely smoking…as if they’d just had a nice round of sex. Philip Guston stared down the hard things including his own frailties with ruthless self-reflection. What’s more, he laughed at the darkness. He stood there with his quaking, shaking, shivery line quality and laughed at it as if to say, "I unmask you, you simpleton cowards, you accusers, you stupid Klansmen. I’ve got a brush. And it’s LARGE!" He acknowledged the will to die by killing it with the will to live. He watched with us through the night. He was honest. He was clear. He was vibrant.
For those who insist that Guston’s earlier abstractions possess a tension inconsistently sustained in the later representational paintings; yes, indeed. However, the reason for this is not, as some have claimed, because he was a "lesser" artist or because a plague of Jewish guilt inhibited him. If anything his shortcomings, whatever they may have been, were his strengths. Without them he might have succumbed to repeating the early fifties ad infinitum. Instead, he charged forward. Despite the ensuing awkwardness, he took the modernist spiritual approach of following his heart. He pursued this road even though it made him appear to reject the very thing he loved. His stated goal was "TO LIVE THE PAINTING." Clearly, Rothko, his supposed enemy, would have agreed. Guston had no choice but to renounce the potential pitfalls he saw inherent in the philosophies of his fellow artists: dangers such as, exclusive purity can lose touch with compassion or assimilating mess can lose touch with refinement. He had to separate himself to be free. In doing so he mustered the courage to make embarrassingly clunky paintings in the face of what he saw as the then pervasive Rothkian elegance.
The fact of the matter is Guston was chased by heart problems and age. He was running out of time and expressed frustration about it. Given another year or two, it is likely he would have further blended his textural prowess and unique personal vocabulary with the elegant sublime he previously acknowledged. It was rapidly occurring in the paintings of 1979 when a synthesis between the two styles emerge with an emphasis on the interplay of shadows among the brushstrokes and a new attention to the width of strokes in contrast to the size of the canvas which is especially apparent in the late painting, "Large Brush." It is interesting to note this occurs in concordance with the figures having lost their masks. As the imagery continued to develop throughout the years the Klan demons were discarded. It must be said that stupid masked men require idiotic blunt brushstrokes and this is why Guston painted them so, uncomfortable as it may be to accept. The doubt as to his achievement is so nitpicky as to be ridiculous. So, let’s let that slow moon sink.
With his feet nailed to the ladder Philip Guston climbed on. This was the trial he was fitted to prosecute. His closing argument unveiled a biography of spiritual struggle and not only its arriving heights.
Sources:
Philip Guston Retrospective, with essays by Dore Ashton, Michael Auping, Bill Berkson, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Philip Guston, Joseph Rishel, Michael E. Shapiro. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in association with Thames and Hudson.
One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, edited by Kenneth Rexroth.
Philip Guston’s Self-Doubt, by Donald Kuspit. Artnet Magazine, 12/4/03.
