Jean Miotte Dances
by Donald Kuspit
It is especially in Miotte’s late works–the paintings of the last two decades of the twentieth century–that the radical bodily character of his painting becomes self-evident. But even as early as Essor and D�route, both 1956,and �tourdi, 1961, and also two untitled painting of 1964–all are excruciatingly black and abruptly gestural, as though only in exploring the violent absence which black is could the presence of the dynamic body be recovered (only by dancing with the negative that is the fundament of the positive can one embody it)–there are intimations of this radicality. From the beginning, Miotte had two painterly projects, two modes of painterly expression: music painting, epitomized by such works as Contrepoint, 1958 and Staccato, 1960, and dance painting, conveying the body dancing to its own music. He came to realize that dance expression was more fundamental than music expression. The former, symbolized by libidinous, tender-minded color, subsumed the latter, symbolized by aggressive, tough-minded blackness, and sometimes ousted it completely, that is, eliminated color as though it was beside the point–as though it detracted from intensity. Miotte’s music painting is poignant, his dance painting pungent: his music painting is emotional, his dance painting is existential. The negativity of black is not entropic for Miotte, but generative of a deeper awareness of existence than life-affirmative color. It is as though, in dancing his black paintings, he was hardening himself to the truth whose blows to the body were softened by color. The sensuousness of color adulterated the truth of blackness, and Miotte finally was able to state the truth without flinching.
Sheer bodily fatality is unequivocal in the eschatological negativity of the black dances of the nineties–perhaps the most relentless of Miotte’s painterly outbursts. Especially 1995: in that year Miotte painted, in what must have been a vitalizing rage, the grand sequence of Le D�fi, Je, Nowhere, Pourquoi?, Seul, Sais-Tu?, Acte Continue, and La Bête. The breathless, angry debate with his own body continues to rage in a number of equally intense and climatic 1997 paintings, among them L’Emoi, Excalibur, King Arthur, and into 1998 with Le D�bat and in 1999 Osterspaziergang, �trange Histoire, Aujourd’hui Demain, and Pr�sence. In these works the black gesture is revelatory, like a burning bush or pillar of smoke–a painterly flash that remains uneasily in memory, even as it remains memorable. Miotte’s black paintings are an amazing testimony to sustained creativity and feverish concentration–an extraordinary, vigorous late style, continuing into 2000 with And Why and Abime. Color makes a return in them, competing with blackness but not defeating it, an ecstatic intimacy already visible in H�r�tique, Fièvre, and Illimit� Cosmique, all of 1999. In them Miotte fuses music painting and dance painting–a synthesis of the alpha and omega of modernist painting. His all-encompassing oeuvre is its definite summary.
Thus Miotte makes it clear that gestural painting is not simply an expression of energy but of one’s total sense of one’s body. More subtly, he implies that there is no painterly energy without the painter’s total investment of his bodily life in the painting. To be convincing, so-called instinctive painting must engage and evoke the body that has instinct. It must not only make us conscious of unconscious instinct, but convey a subliminal experience of bodiliness through the bodily power of the painterly dance. It must not simply suggest the possibility of such ecstatic experience, but realize it concretely. Only then can the painting be spontaneous and convincing–as original painting, that is painting that reminds us that the body is our origin. We always resist that "regressive" truth, but Miotte’s paintings demonstrate it through their provocative bodiliness.
In the best dancing–in Miotte’s painterly dancing, bodily movement is the medium of what Freud called the body ego, which, as he said, is the first, primordial ego. This is why dance is the first, primordial art, and why all art tends implicitly towards dance, which has music built into it. In a sense, dance is the embodiment of the body ego; it struggles to make the intangible inner body–our inner experience of our body–tangible in the painterly body. Miotte goes one passionate step further: the intense gestures of abstract painting are experienced as the elemental traces of the process of primordial embodiment. They convey the shifting lines of emotional force in the body ego. Restless yet resilient, it can only be known though its metamorphoses. In short, Miotte’s paintings, taken as a whole, convey virtually every nuance of the elusive dance of bodily life. He follows this dance in himself, however hard it is to follow, attuning to his psychosoma with rare nerve and uncanny precision.
Thus for Miotte dance conveys, seemingly without mediation, the changing moods of or bodily being. More than any other art, it bypasses the repression barrier, as Freud called it, generating a sense of emotional immediacy and existential urgency. Bodily moods, however intricate, are innocently given–involuntary. Diaghilev’s ballets are exquisite inventions, but their bodily movements are innate to the psychosoma rather than invented by art. Art can refine, combine, and perform them, making us self-conscious about them–choreographed in a dance, they acquire fresh meaning as well as new immediacy–but they remain fundamental apart from the dance as well as fundamental to it. They are its psychosomatic substratum; however consciously organized, the dance is unconvincing unless it establishes contact–however fleetingly–with this substratum: the dance must make the slippery movement of emotion visible through the subtle movements of the dancing body. Without dance to embody our deepest emotions, we would not feel that our bodies really exist, and without the body’s language to express them, the dance would be matter in meaningless motion rather than fundamental to life. The dance’s function is in fact to sensitize us to the body and the fundamental emotions that are inseparable from it. In daily life we are rarely if ever attuned to either–we go about our business as though the body is in the way of our minds, reluctantly accommodating to the body when we would rather ignore it. This is why the everyday body is no more than matter in functional motion. It is the body naively experienced as physical rather than experienced existentially from the emotional inside.
The dancer seems effortlessly shift from elation to despair, his body wordlessly conveying the dialectic of mood. The dancer allows his body to submit to his feelings, giving up any effort to control them. Thus they seem to manifest themselves directly in the movements of his body. Each movement seems to distill a specific feeling, which remains formless until it is danced. But that does not give it a name, only a form that conveys its dynamic. It remains nameless, which makes it all the more real–realized by the dance. The paradox of dance is that the more calculated its movements the more spontaneous its emotional effect. In dance, control is a way of focusing feeling rather than of inhibiting it. Witnessing Miotte’s painterly dance, we become conscious of feelings–primordial feelings about existence and life–that we would otherwise never become conscious of, and can never become completely conscious of however conscious we are that they are being danced, indeed, that they seem to have being only when they are embodied by the dancing body.
To experience one’s deepest feelings about existence and life is to surrender to one’s body’s temporality and the rhythms that embody it. Thea have nothing to do with everyday time: the dancer moves to the flexible rhythms of the natural time in his body rather than to the regimented rhythms of social time. Recognizing the shallowness and rigidity of social time, with its false inevitability, he bares witness to the fluidity of inevitability of natural time. Thus dancing is liberating–a revolution in individual life, lifting it out of collective time for however brief an artistic moment. The aura of timeliness is the living substance of Abstract Expressionist painting. If a gesture is not timely, it falls flat and loses its individuality; Miotte’s gestures never do–their dance is always timely. Living in natural time through the painterly dance–moving with its ebb and flow, going wherever its contradictory currents carry him, with no resistance to what is in fact unconsciously irresistible–the individual is no longer an object in the world but a subjective organism. The German language distinguishes between Leib and K�rper–the lived body and the physical object. To dance is to assert oneself as a Leib. To dance is to refuse to treat one’s body as though it was a K�rper–an inert object going about its social tasks, pushed around by the world. It is to give up being a social robot and become a vital being. It is to refuse to be socially reified. At the very least, for the artistic moment of the dance, the curse of social reification is lifted and the emotional and existential damage it has caused is healed. To dance is to take your body back from the world that imagines it owns your body and soul–and thus to recover your soul. To dance with all one’s body, as Miotte is able to do through painting, is to be a nonconformist in a conformist world. Especially when one improvises one’s movements–when they suddenly appear, as though out of nowhere–as they seem to do in Miotte’s painterly dancing.
"I am racing toward uncertainty where the truth catches me unaware," Miotte wrote in a notebook. The issue is not so much to master uncertainty and replace it with certainty, but to articulate the uncertainty of the truth itself. There is a "cosmic quality in nearly all my work, in the large formats as well as the fragments," he also writes, adding that "it is more a subconscious influence than a precise intention." The body feels uncertain in the cosmos, and the cosmos looks uncertain compared to the body, which futilely attempts to take its measure, and ends up acknowledging its immeasurability–yet finding the cosmos in itself, that is, in the "subconscious," to use Miotte’s word. Thus through uncertain dance Miotte experiences the cosmic character of his body and embodies the cosmic uncertainty of bodily being.
I have been describing, in general terms, Miotte’s abstract paintings. They are a mode of dance: what distinguishes Miotte from other Abstract Expressionists is that he dances his paintings rather than constructs them. For both American and European Abstract Expressionists structure tends to come before gesture, however much gesture constructs structure–Franz Kline is the most obvious example in America, and Nicholas de Stael in France–whereas for Miotte structure never fully emerges from gesture. It remains dominant, and seemingly independent, as it does in dance. The dance may have a structure, but it is experienced through the movements of the dance–the gesture of the dancer’s body–not as a separate "Platonic" idea. In Miotte’s paintings one sees fragments–suggestions?–of structure that do not add up to any coherent whole. This is in part because his gestures cannot be contained by any structure. They do not animate a pre-given structure, or reveal it, as seems in many Abstract Expressionist paintings, but transcend the very idea of structure through their relentless dynamic. Gestures range Miotte’s paintings freely, leaving structure unresolved, and ultimately irrelevant: the body ego is not a structure, it is a timely flow of existential feeling. There is no definitiveness of structure in Miotte’s paintings, but an elusive indefiniteness of gesture, often full-bodied, sometimes elusively bodily. Structure is beside the point of such startling abstractions as Burst Triptych, 1997: the gestures have dramatically shattered the structure–the containment–of the canvas itself. Miotte never takes structure for granted–not even the structure of the canvas remains fixed.
There is no predetermined, settled state of being in his paintings, but a sense of headlong, uncontainable becoming. It gathers more and more momentum over the years, being greater expressive freedom. When Miotte uses the traditional canvas, with its closed geometry, he challenges its limits perhaps most strikingly in South, 1991, with its implicitly infinite sweep of turbulent gestures, at once grand and subtle, noble and lyric, a panoramic terrain of painterly magma. Again and again we see Miotte threatening the boundary of the canvas, implicitly subverting its geometrical rigidity–it is a reluctantly accepted social convenience for him–with his painterly dancing, which conveys the primordial sensuality of the lived body, indeed, the body ego that is only fully lived in sensual painterly dance.
