Platonic Dialogues: In and Out of the Cave
By David Markus
"They must be made to ascend until they arrive at the good; but…they must be made to descend again among the prisoners of the den, and partake of their labors and honors…."
—Plato: The Allegory of the Cave
The Allegory
In Plato’s definitive treatise on the mind, the venerable grandfather of Western philosophy attempts to explain the ways by which humankind is chastened to illusion and artifice. He presents a scenario in which those residing within an imagined cave are subject to a filtered reality of shadow play projected from the world outside. Knowing nothing else, these allegorical cavemen mistake the projections for reality, though occasionally a certain ambitious few will possess the tenacity to escape their shadowy confines and revel in the enlightened knowledge of the outside world. Embracing the truth, however, is an arduous process unto itself. The blinding light and disillusionment cause terrible pain to the novitiate as he struggles to reconcile illusion and actuality. Furthermore, a barrier is drawn between himself and his former peers, for although he may venture back into the cave, his attempts to convey his knowledge will be met with disbelief. While the allegory has been adapted by everyone from Christianity to contemporary education administrators, the art world has most often used it to explain our relationship to television and cinema.
Shadows, Rags, and Rope, a recent three-man show at Broadway Gallery, challenges us to view Plato’s "Allegory of the Cave" in relation to the contemporary artspace. Doing so sheds an excavational light not just on the work presented in the Shadows exhibit, but on the processes of art viewing and creation themselves. Extrapolating from Plato’s allegory, and the ideas put forward by the artists exhibited in this show, may also help to explain how Lee Bontecou, this Fall’s hottest ticket at MoMA Qns (whose drawings were on display at Knoedler and Co. through July 30), has maintained a thirty year absence from the art world only to return with a major retrospective that has been heralded as nothing less than triumphant. But, I will hold off on discussing her work until the end.
The Cave
Curator/Artist Peter Gerakaris has a flair for synthesizing media. A recent graduate of Cornell University’s School of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Gerakaris studied an interdisciplinary track before eventually completing his degree in painting. He conceived of Shadows in conjunction with two other Brooklyn based artists: Tra Bouscaren, who contributed a series of rag installations, most of which reference projected shadows of the human figure; and J.D. Messick, who constructed an arching, site-specific rope installation which is at once an accomplished foray into the non-representational, and a binding element in the "holistic experience" Shadows hopes to provide its viewers.
If, loosely speaking, Messick’s installation corresponds to the cave itself, and Bouscaren’s rags reference the cave wall projections of Plato’s Allegory, Gerakaris’s paintings can be thought of as intimate spaces within which to contemplate the interwoven themes of illusion, artifice, and–what else?–gallery going. Taking cues from Russian Constructivism and American Cubist Realism, Gerakaris’s paintings lend static precision to an otherwise unrestrained pageant of rope and fabric. They are the ordering mechanisms of the exhibit, grounding Bouscaren’s expressionism and Messick’s abstraction in palpable paint-collages of architectural spaces and photo-derived images.
Contrary to the larger-than-life installations that surround them, these modest, contemplative works encourage close viewing, thus creating an environment in which the gallery-goer must constantly adjust his viewing position and focus when attempting to take in the totality of this multi-scale exhibit. Gerakaris’s almost essayistic synthesis of well-rendered representational form and abstraction gives his paintings an acute allure, prohibiting them from being dwarfed by their unbound peers while providing new entry points into the larger scale works via allegories of their own devising.
Two of the six paintings are composed on three-dimensional canvasses bearing sculpturally symbiotic relationships to the images they contain. One such work, entitled "Mimesis," resembles a perspectival diorama in which a looming shadow, painted across the floor and back wall of the micro-space, juxtaposes itself mockingly with the viewer’s own. That the painted shadow closely resembles that of Rodin’s "The Thinker" suggests the activity of viewing as an essential element of the artwork itself, and such observer/observed mimesis lends playfulness to an art historical reference which might otherwise be seen as melodramatic. In other paintings, human figures project shadows consciously associated with ape-like forms. The division between the expressivity of the shadows and the tight composure of the figures again casts its own shadow of irony across the hubristic notion of man’s heightened state, embodied in the image of the thinking man.
This is not to say Gerakaris takes thinking lightly. Rather, his sense of self-irony is just becoming enough to engage the potentially dissuaded viewer in the complex mental and visual struggles he seeks to capture. Many of his works involve a focused consideration of the relationship between artist and audience, and at least three of the paintings overtly reference the gallery itself–their long, receding lines mimicking the ubiquitous hardwood floors of Manhattan exhibit spaces.
In one such painting, a set of panoptic eyes–resembling Gerakaris’s own–peers in on a cluster of miniature figures. Though the figures are clothed for winter and a manhole resides on the floor, the depicted space cannot help but invoke the very gallery the viewer is standing in. Oddly, the miniature gallery goers in the painting have their backs turned away from the viewer. Gerakaris’s glance follows their tiny shadows off into nothingness with perhaps a subtle anxiety about their seeming lack of enthusiasm. That the painting is a diptych, with the receding figures on one panel and Gerakaris’s eyes on the other, further emphasizes the space between artist and audience that Gerakaris so wishes to bridge.
At the opening, Gerakaris expressed to me his frustration at his actual audience’s seeming lack of acknowledgement toward the shows synergetic aims. Such an acknowledgement seems, to me, unnecessary, for what is so impressive about Shadows is its natural, almost unnoticeable, integration of three markedly different artists. Indeed, the most overt visual link between the works (a crouching cloth figure of Buscaren’s whose loose threads have been attached to the lower corner of Messick’s arc) is the one place the attempt at integration seems overwrought.
No analogy can be precisely appropriated to suit a parallel aim, just as no analogy can, itself, perfectly express its progenitor’s ideas. Language is always a barrier as well as an aid. Indeed, for Plato, language was seen as more akin to cave wall illusions than the objects of truth. So it follows that the application of the cave allegory to the art here presented is fraught with inversion and contradiction. This is not, in the least, a bad thing. As is often the case, what is most controvertible is also the most fascinating.
Messick’s rope installation, for example, overtly associates the gallery with the interior of Plato’s cave. Yet it also asserts itself as an object, and–via the shadows it projects–an illusion, within the greater cave-space of the gallery. Constructed out of one continuous line, it resembles an architectural mock-up which is at once monumental and fragile in form. Though it is fastened to the wall in a succinct, mathematical manner, one has the sense that a suddenly slammed door would send its less-taught contours swaying like a hammock in the breeze.
Close examination further reveals this fragility: frayed edges, reworked fastenings, a distinct hand-madeness that belies its initial algorithmic appearance. And is there, after all, anything more tenuous in materiality and metaphorical association than thread? Threads are used to tie together things (like ideas). But they also denote the space between. They are fine, sinewy, prone to breakage. Messick could respond, "yes, but this is rope, buddy, remember? Shadows, Rags, and… Rope," though I doubt he would, for it is the eluctable nature of his installation that lends it beauty in both thought and form.
Transformative, but not obstructive, Messick’s work unites, in sensibility, the precision of Gerakaris’ paintings and expressionism of Bouscaren’s rags. We are invited to view the objects over which it arcs as both art and artifice, projections as well as products of a (potentially enlightened) world outside the gallery–which, paradoxically, corresponds to the inner world of the artist’s imagination (how’s that for threadwork?).
In the case of Buscaren’s rags, the work presented is literally composed out of the materials of the artist’s inner space–an extension of which is manifest in the only grounds more essential to works of art then the galleries, museums, or private collections which are their hopeful destinations. I refer, of course, to the artist’s studio.
The Controvert
Bouscaren is primarily a painter–a painter’s painter. His application is thick, his brushstrokes expressive. And like painter’s painters before him, his studio doubles as a storage space for vast piles of discarded rags which recall the backdrops to Lucian Freud paintings. Buscaren’s canvasses themselves resemble what those of the London School might have had Freud and Auerbach toiled away their younger years (as Bouscaren did) among the convivial foodstalls and bordellos of Tangiers and Marrakech. In contrast to the sickly pallor which hangs, like a shroud, over the work of such revered Londonites, Bouscaren’s palette seems lifted from the henna-dyed tarpaulins and cobalt vases of a Morrocan market square.
I find it necessary to discuss Bouscaren’s paintings in relation to his installation work because (1) his rag-constructed Shadows are somewhat in the shadow of his remarkable canvasses; and (2) Bouscaren has a conveniently concurrent show of his paintings (Group Show in my Head) at the MATCH artspace (115 W. 23rd St. Loft 61) which informs both the Shadows exhibit and our understanding of the painter’s greater aims.
Following in the footsteps of the New Art Dealers Alliance, Marc de Bourcy, director of MATCH, takes an alternative approach to presenting art, and insists that his space is not a gallery, but an "artspace" or "kunsthaus." MATCH, which doubles as de Bourcy’s private residence, is an intimate venue–perfect for small solo shows–tucked somewhere in that nameless space of lower midtown whose single greatest landmark is the Chelsea Hotel.
The space is just large enough to allow Buscaren’s splashy, arresting canvasses to breath (it also provides roof access for the rest of us). Though Bouscaren possesses the violent expressivity of Jackson Pollock, his works are deeply routed in figurative observation (de Bourcy says his own regard for figurative painting reflects a European sensibility sometimes absent from the New York art scene). Yet Bouscaren’s expressive markings remain the captivating force behind his subject matter; there is currently a James Rosenquist painting (Untitled, 1988) on display at the Jacobson Howard Gallery which addresses themes–familiar to Bouscaren–of nature, sexuality, and violence, but his inter-spliced photographic renderings have far less emotive effects on their viewer.
In the painting which accompanied the MATCH show’s postcard, Bouscaren portrays two tigers engaged in either fierce combat or mating ritual in which the action seems to have spilled out into extra-diegetic space during the frenetic moments of its conception. Slashes of blue and red paint obstruct the image as if, caught in the crossfire of their dueling, Bouscaren had resolved to claw back. In its attention to form and composition the painting displays a traditionalism that is simultaneously (as de Bourcy put it) "punk rock."
The title of this work, "Man is the Measure of All Things Unfinished," could be seen as the philosophical treatise Bouscaren’s artwork strives to enforce: a rejection of Platonic idealism and an embrace of the imperfect–that layer of reality (hierarchically inferior by Plato’s regard) in which we live and order our surroundings through sensuality and material objects. Such an inversion does not, however, detract from the usefulness of Plato’s cave allegory. As a former Yale Philosophy student, Plato is someone Bouscaren has no doubt considered at length, and although his final destination may differ from that of the dialectical sage, the challenges involved in arriving there remain the same. Pain and revelation are inexorably linked for both the enlightened novitiate (in Plato’s allegory) and the artist (in the case of Bouscaren) who must grapple with the dark projections of his interior world.
So, too, in the act of love.
In what is perhaps the most stunning realization of this conceit, Bouscaren portrays a passionately engaged couple in the form of a reverse "Pietà." The faceless man plays surrogate to the church-like structure of Mother Mary, but is at once as fragile and skinny as the depiction of Christ in Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Likewise, although the woman is cradled by the embrace, it is not clear whether she is enraptured by pleasure or pain, though the strand of rope hanging conspicuously from the upper right corner seems to suggest the latter. This discomfiting inclusion also alludes to the noose-like forms in the paintings of Phillip Guston–an artist who has influenced Bouscaren, and whose work demonstrates a similar interweaving of pain and revelation.
Taking Bouscaren’s inversion of Platonic ideals into account, one is compelled to reconsider the work presented in the Shadows exhibit. Whereas the cave figures, in Plato, as a prison, it may also function as a place of integrated revelation. Part of the show’s striking cohesion may be due to the fact that Bouscaren, Messick, and Gerakaris occupy adjoining studios, and are therefore open to mutual influence at the very act of creation. The studio is also inversely related to Plato’s cave (the Shadows press-release bore reference to Bouscaren’s "cave-like studio") in that it functions as a space of chosen asylum in which the artist’s work may be incubated before being brought to the outside world. This brings us, finally, to the work of Lee Bontecou, a contemporary artist with whom this last remark resonates like no other.
The Recluse
Bontecou achieved fame in the 1960s, exhibiting alongside Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg at the Leo Castelli Gallery, but disappeared from the New York art scene (for much speculated reasons) around the end of that decade. During her thirty year hibernation, she taught at the art department at Brooklyn College and quietly went about creating mixed media works at her studio in rural Pennsylvania. Now, she has emerged from the cave, returning to Manhattan with an exhibit of her drawings at Knoedler. At the time I am writing this, her larger scale sculptures and reliefs have yet to hit the warehouse pavement of MoMa Qns, but reviews of her shows at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and MCA in Chicago, have been enthusiastic.
As with Bouscaren’s rag installations, Bontecou has utilized the waste products of her primary medium to create a strong series of parallel works. A number of her drawings, some of which appear to be models for later works, are created using the leftover soot from welding projects. Most of them demonstrate a startling ardor that rivals the triumphed masterpieces of her early work.
Though Bontecou’s work frequently depicts mechanical objects, her touch is wholly organic, discarding draftsman-like crosshatching for a more expressive shading technique of squiggles and curls. Yet, in many of her works, an undeniable geometry prevails. Stepping back from her intimate drawings, the gestural randomness dissolves into careful precision, composing spaces which, though not perspectival, are wholly unified in conception.
Apropos to the Shadows exhibit, the unifying form in Bontecou’s works (then and now) is a cave-like opening which she has, ironically (and counter-aesthetically), associated not with inner-, but outer-space. This form reappears in soot and pencil with striking dimensionality, suggesting a world which is sacred and imaginative, but also unknown, and potentially horrifying. Still, most intriguing among the works presented at Knoedler are her venturings outside the cave, in which she brings us a kind of pre-historic surrealism that is at once tyrannized by the shackles of industry.
Alien terrain and Primordial aquatic landscapes abound. Curiously, one such work closely resembles the landscape drawings of Arshile Gorky–an artist not often associated with Bontecou–whose paper-works were recently exhibited at the Whitney. Here, it is the unlikely interplay of observation and imagination (yet another interior/exterior bifurcation) which prevails.
The Redemption
In an art world preoccupied with postmodern naval-gazing, it is refreshing to see work which relies, primarily, on the thrust of intense personal vision. To the great success of his paintings, Tra Bouscaren has spent most of his artistic career away from the New York art scene (he intends to move to Peru this fall). Likewise, Audiences of Bontecou’s retrospective can attest that her works have only deepened in complexity over her long asylum, retaining her signature interplay of organic and manmade form, and, if anything, carrying out her vision to even greater success. This gives rise to the question: how much (if any) influence from the "outside world" (in this case, the very insider’s world of art) does an artist really need? When it comes to artists as visually enlightened as those discussed herein, the answer is: very little.
