The Flesh and Bone of Moral Theory
The principle of art we have inherited from Nietzsche is easily conceived. As the primary influence on aesthetic thinking for the last 100 years, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche endows us with a clear project and uncomplicated goal: Art is not a conveyance of conceptual thought – it is an invocation of an incisive emotional state, a rendering of and instigation for an apprehension that is indescribable in words. The conference of art, universally, is the quality of Pathos, the ambience and attitude of the aesthetic emotion, which is always a tragic emotion. Art is a heartbreak, and that breaking of the sympathetic spirit marks out a truth horizon which defies the power to describe. Art is a knowledge we do not know but feel, and it argues and apprehends us with a dominating, overwhelming power.
Concepts degrade art – Nietzsche’s proposition is that simple. Or, as the poet Archibald MacLeish made clear: "A poem should not mean / But be." So too, a painting, a sculpture, a symphony – they say nothing, even as they "say" more than we can bear. And so, the reliance of artists on embedded messages is a misdirection, and Conceptual Art is a contradiction in terms, or at least, a misnomer, for the authentic inspiration is never lost and is perennial, and it invades all artistic modes and movements. As Sol LeWitt observed: "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."
Yet, for all the self-insistence that art remain art, for all the inner propulsion to hold to the legitimate tack, what we frequently consider art and discover around us as taken to be art departs from the implicitly identifying character of the thing. The error of uninflected messaging, of a literal-mindedness directing artistic practice, is everywhere among us now, as it has been for decades, and we may recognize it in the talk attending the works. We observe it in the press releases from the galleries, in the artist’s statements, in the reviews, and in the texts of the art theory that has come to replace aesthetics. The terminology is all wrong, and it inadvertently confesses a flaw of intention: works of art "explore" their subject matter, they "investigate" what concerns them, they "problemmatize" what they consider. But the purpose of art is not to explore – it is to reveal. The artist is required not to question something, but to know something. The artist must not confuse the issue but clarify it, even if, particularly if, to clarify is to reveal the fathomlessness of what the artist attends. In the purest Nietzschean meaning, the artist is to invoke an extraordinary emotional state that is, in fact, a bolt of insight into the heart of existence.
Authentic artists are rare creatures, regardless of university art departments and funding programs and international biennials, and authentic art is hard to find. Nevertheless, as in all things, the incidence of authenticity in art is regular – it cannot be hastened or forestalled, and there remain real artists to be found and recognized, and relished. And there is one present in a small and splendid exhibition at Rome Arts in Williamsburg.
Suzan Dionne, an artist I know well, is an artist whose work everyone should see, and this exhibition is your first chance. A New York artist who was born in Canada, Dionne is finally beginning to break through – just as she is having her second solo exhibition at the Newzones Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, she is now having her first New York solo exhibition at Rome Arts.
The Rome Arts gallery is a small space, and the exhibition is necessarily small in scope – just three of Dionne’s paintings in oil on canvas. Even though it is circumspect in its range, this exhibition is visually vocable – these paintings inform with a comprehensive sense of Dionne’s art, they make clear what it is that only a few of us, those who have known her work over recent years, have had the privilege to see.
The three works share a title and a vintage – all are titled Halo, distinguished by series numbers, and all were done last year. And all three share a common principle of imagery. Each work portrays a simple, iconic image – a nearly blank image executed in black – set against a monochromatic but tonally rich and complex background, a receding yet strangely flat backdrop that varies in value and intensity, resembling a pure aerial vista in a hue that is wrong for the sky, in greens, in magentas, in versions of violet. Reference to the titles makes clear the intention of the drafting. The foreground, black images are in fact distortions of the symbolic principle of the halo: Halo, 2002 is a floating circle, rendered into an oval by an apparent perspective effect, that is broken off at the left, with the two loose ends separating. In Halo III, 2002, the circle is broken off at the bottom and hovers like a set of pincers. In Halo II, 2002, the distortion is at its most extreme. The circular image has twisted into a snaking contortion, like a riverbed coursing through mountainous terrain, viewed from above, or like a snake itself, black as midnight, black as damnation.
Yet, these paintings are not as simple as they first seem. An examination of the painting technique makes evident a more complex care, and a more complex intention, and the simplicity of the drawn image marks an extreme economy of means that is redeemed by a lavish complexity of manner. The rendering of the iconic distortions invokes a dense visual engagement. They are black and featureless, but they are anything but flat. Their eclipse of the visual field possesses a gravitational draw – they drag in the power of sight, drown it in their felt though invisible depths, douse it with a sense of something impending, even as they penetrate it, swallow it with implication and foreboding, an implication and foreboding that cannot be spoken or explained. One cannot determine if they denote convex or concave surfaces. The vector of depth is ambiguous and unavailing, orientation is upended. The edges of the maligned halos are both hard and diffuse simultaneously – they seem almost to smoke into their almost aerial environments, nearly to steam an infection, or perhaps an afflation, into the air, even as they appear concrete realities adrift in an inexplicably concrete void thick with insubstantial materiality, hung in a sheer density of nothingness.
Everything about the painting technique impedes easy visual association and defies the settling down of the visual sense, the integration of the apprehensions of the eye into a coherent and fully comprehend vista. Everywhere you look in these works, everything seems right, and then everything looks wrong. It is a startling experience with images that appear initially so easy, so plain. And there is a conceptual framework that adumbrates the sensation and the implication. The distortions of the halo principle are also and necessarily distortions of the significance of the principle, the distortion of what the halo implies. These works are images of the symbol of heavenly good, of ideal goodness, gone wrong. They mark a slippage in one of the tropes of fundamental values, a contradiction in the symbolic order. The halo here has become black rather than white, smoky and corrupted rather than pure and angelic, denoting of nothing precise instead of the most essential precision – the precision of the moral order. They have become experienced rather than naïve. They have become late rather than initial, laced and charred with history, an end rather than a beginning, rather than the beginning of all things.
But this is merely the conceptual framework, a set of ideas that only adumbrate the implication and import. If this were all there were to Dionne’s work, there would be nearly nothing. But there is far more, and the conceptual approach to her purpose is inevitable, for concepts are the handles by which we afford a verbal hold on the inexpressible. They are initiatory notations that are not to be relied upon, intellectual ladders to be kicked away once we have climbed them. The truth of the work, the knowledge to be revealed, the clarification and bolt of insight, is in the manner in which the visual denotations, the triggers to cognitive association, have been rendered. As always in the finest art, the meaning is not in the image, but in the style.
What Dionne has done with her manner is bring the icon into the realm of actuality, rather than ideational demarcation. She has rendered the curt visual remark with all the complexity necessary for a painter to signify growing, breathing, organic life. And, as in all successful renderings of living existence, the achievement is something both tangible and immaterial – something impossible to describe or identify, something that seems in every regard the very thing it is not. That is the nature of life, of tangible, intangible existence, for existence and the world are beyond identification by words and concepts, and ultimately beyond clear knowledge. Reality and life are structurally more complex than thought, and normative thinking will never encompass them, or any of their portions. The authenticity of the real, however finely diced, will escape the prison of unambiguous thoughts.
Dionne’s halos have been moved to the district of the real, the precinct of life itself – that which the halo of heavenly goodness seeks to command – and, evidently, they wither and distort, char and smoke, in the flame of the living truth. The symbol of the good is intended to denote a simple guiding principle, but the principle cannot stand up to the contingencies of actuality – it cannot apply. Dionne reveals not the principles of moral theory but the flesh and bone of moral theory. And the heart of the moral life is a dilemma, for we who would apply moral guides in our deliberations are not deliberately willing creatures. We are the subjects of the organic will, the recipients and objects of drives that control us, victims of conflicting desires and calibrators of the consequences of every action that ramify into complications too branching, baroque, and labyrinthic to comprehend or predict. We would do good, but it is a dilemma, for as creatures of the earth, as organisms, we know not what we do.
And the dilemma is tragic, for necessarily we misstep with every step, and what is at stake is our highest hopes. Our best intentions steam and burn before our eyes, and the image Dionne ultimately renders is the bruise. That is the evidence of her black iconic forms, that is the living force of her vision – the harm and damage to the flesh that must hope for more than it can ever do, the fever smoldering in the tissues that desire to do more than their desires will allow. Dionne’s images are aftermath, the smoking remains of our impossibilities, and like Nietzsche – the perennial aesthetician, the thinker for whom thought was ever an art – she has realized that art done with authenticity leads to a place Beyond Good and Evil, beyond the comforting deceptions of a moral code. Art leads not to thoughts about life, but to life itself.
One might argue that these works are exemplary of our time, a time of essential ambiguities and Gordian ethical complexities. But, as the finest visual artists, authors, and even composers have testified, it has always been so. The tragedy of ethics, the flesh and bone of the moral life in all its inescapable failures, is the challenge of existence. It is perennial, as is the triumph of authentic art, art that brings the realization, in a felt and irresolvable complexity of apprehension, of our core tragedy, of the heartbreak at the center of the soul. It is a realization of the Sublime, of the knowledge that is beyond knowing and that comes only of art, and there is a profound sublimity in the art of Suzan Dionne.
Suzan Dionne
Rome Arts
Williamsburg, NY
Sources:
Web Sites:
Dionne Paintings
http://www.suzandionne.com
Newzones | gallery of contemporary art
See "Artists"
http://www.newzones.com
References:
Archibald MacLeish. "Ars Poetica"
Sol LeWitt. "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in Art in Theory: 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 837-9.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. (New York: The Modern Library, 1968)
