The Culture of Diagram

By John Bender

Stanford University Press 2010



Book Review by Donald Brackett:

-Highly Recommended



This is a critical genealogy of diagrammatic knowledge presented in an interdisciplinary format which covers the last 250 years of western culture and brings into clear focus the parallel paths of visual art, cultural studies and scientific representation. James Elkins has often commented on the forgotten third in the triad of writing/image/diagram, especially in his own “The Visual Domain”, and he has observed astutely that a diagram is an amalgam rife with internal discontinuities, detecting how its frontiers offer a realm where images model thought outside of all linguistic containment. In Bender’s new comprehensive survey of the diagram’s often secret history, new conceptual ground is broken in a manner both entertaining and informative.

This book is an archaeology of the diagram, in all its scope and mystery: it offers a means of fully appreciating the wide range of symbolic forms available to us as expressively creative creatures. No other means of unifying art, myth, religion, language and the sciences into a coherent whole which recognizes the organic nature of signification is quite as effective as that of the dinergic model managed by governing dynamics. The culture being explored here is that of visual thinking itself, a fascinating terrain where Bender demonstrates how words meet pictures and formulas meet figures. He has foregrounded diagrams as mutable tools for further blurring the boundaries between images and ideas. He has also managed to draw provocative lines linking the diagram itself to our own inner sense of modernity.

The master of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer, has remarked on their subtle operation in our lives in a way which sheds light on the importance of understanding how diagram can evolve into emblem, and how emblem can enforce embodied meanings. “Human culture taken as a whole,” he has remarked, “may be described as the process of people’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science, are various phases in the process. They also tend in different directions and they obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness do not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement each other. The dissonant is in harmony with itself., the contraries are not mutually exclusive but interdependent, harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the violin and the bow.” The Culture of Diagram invites us to consider a realm where formal differences cease to be contradictions, one where word and image are wed.

in perspective

IN PERSPECTIVE:

Considering the Paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove


By Donald Brackett



“Each line is now the actual experience, with its own innate history.
It does not illustrate---it is the sensation of its own realization.”

Cy Twombly




The paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove being celebrated in this fifteen year survey show are ideal emblems for the abstract process by which the everyday life experience of an artist is graphically transformed into embodied moments of exceptional beauty and profound rigor. Her graceful collisions of calligraphy and brushstroke are also an effective means of exploring abstract ruminations on life’s minutest details. The resultant images in this perspective are raw but refined, accidental but organized, linguistic but silent. They are often also a vivid unconscious diary of the living process that created them.
Jo Petty has observed about great painting: “Mark making is the beginning of it all.” This perspective show is a veritable celebration of the magic of making such marks. It is the marks themselves which articulate the painter’s narrative, from one body of work to the next, in images where sign, signifier and signified are all synonymous.
For Cosgrove, there is far less of a boundary between the left brain that produces words and the right brain that produces images, since both can produce poetry: “Words are integral to what I do. I come to my visual perceptions through language; the subject of my work is loosely framed in a dialogue between the articulated surface and the politics of existence where I find myself.”
A work like 1998’s “The Messiness of Hope” for instance, seems to suggest a radiant poetry of the physical, a realm of structural meaning that mirrors the very arena in which language itself operates, and that painting, like all the bodies of work over this creative time span, utilizes a visual syntax and optical semantics made up of line, colour, shape, and composition.
The curious family resemblance between brushstrokes and sentences in 2001’s “Alphabet romantique” reminds us that long before language took over the job, graphic pictures were used to convey literal meanings. Indeed, this selection of paintings suggests that graphic form and colour content have their own personal dialect, one that provides pure retinal meaning.
The fierce quantum net of intersecting strokes suggesting a tapestry gone bonkers which we behold in 2010’s “Habitat” indicates a clear evolution of visual motifs introduced much earlier in this painter’s career arc. This is precisely the kind of thematic continuity we hope for in the art of painting and it is also the most crucial feature of the persistent gaze that is so clearly evident in all of Cosgrove’s work.
From the elegant urban cacophony of 1995’s “The View From Here” to the austere splendour of today’s “Habitat”, there is a stubbornness, commitment and dedication in evidence which rewards repeated viewing. Here, idea and language are merged with and mutated through the spontaneous contents of intuition and image as they both mutually graze on the experiences of everyday life. Though the written word itself serves as the principal motif that runs throughout her work over the past two decades, in her case neither word nor brushstroke is placed in subordination to the other. What you see, as Stella once remarked, is what you see.
Her ongoing oeuvre contains a total aggregate of the things to which the word abstract is applicable: she invites us not only into what the Greeks called the very forest of things, ourselves among them, but also into the forest of language, and the words we use to describe those things around us.
But things, just like the words that attempt to capture them, are in a constant state of flux, which is the other significant temporal reality consistently being explored in her work over the years. One common trait shared by the several bodies of work assembled here, apart from each being both visually beautiful and aesthetically rigorous, is that they capture some of the essence of what every good painting is really all about: time and its passing through us.
These works remind us how visually fresh and topically urgent painting can still be in this digital age. They also remind us of one very useful artistic adage: though no painter can go back and make a brand new start, everyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.

“Anne-Marie Cosgrove: 15 Years of Painting / A Perspective” was exhibited at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto, from April 14th to 25th.

Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based art critic, curator and educator who teaches an integrated culture course at OCAD exploring the history, issues, theory and practice of art, design and architecture. He is currently curating an exhibition exchange between Canada and Belgium called “FUGITIVE: Painting In The 21rst Century”.

IN VITREOUS VERITAS

By


Donald Brackett





“..between the tunnel and the train, between the victim and his
stain, once again once again, love calls you by your name…”
Leonard Cohen







The poet Rilke once opined that surely all art is the result of having been in some danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where one can go no further. Cohen would probably agree with the sentiment. Now, Rilke was seldom wrong, especially in matters of the heart, however, what I think he meant to say was that all great or interesting art is thus derived. That slight difference is also a significant one, since our attention is seldom captured by the expression of everyday comforts.
Stuart Reid’s most recent body of work, though following a sense of continuity within his own practice as a visual artist, is also a drastic departure which was inspired by the sensation of being in emotional extremis, for a variety of reasons. This work is a veritable cartography of the feelings associated with the twin poles of loss and longing.
Many artists aspire to unveil or reveal the sense of objective truth, either through representation or expression, in a locus of near universal values which are shared by the viewer. Fewer artists struggle with the more dangerous realm of subjective truths, personal verities which the viewer will soon come to realize they share but which they may not initially recognize.
Fewer still are the artists who willingly step into the in-between zone, that interstitial zone between the extremities of yes and no. Whether it is the tension between control and accident of his glass notations; or the wrestling match between memory and imagination of his drawings drawn from an immersion into the chaos of mourning, or the love affair between object and environment of his amorphous installation arrangements, his core subject and theme seems to me to remain relatively constant. The polar embrace of presence and absence.
I’m not quite sure why, but the notion of stumbling home from Banff, the ostensible narrative source for the show’s work, suddenly appeared to me to be ironically similar to that of slouching toward Bethlehem, as originally envisioned by another poet of the darkness, Yeats. But rather than wondering what rough beast is being born, we are imagining what smooth creature has survived.
Stuart Reid is both concocting and sharing maps of a territory which seem to meet all the requirements of what early medieval mapmakers called terra incognita, the unknown land. The exception is that his geography is that of an interior territory made of feelings and the meanings we make of them. That, in the end, might be all that any great artistic expression consists of : the application or superimposition of meaning onto the mayhem of quotidian living.
Originally trained as a painter as well as an architect and glass artist, Reid’s strikingly minimal and emotionally raw surfaces capture the essence of what it means to be successfully interdisciplinary. “Our Coupling”, a piece with obvious domestic overtones which also contains uniquely dialectical undertones, conveys a delicately balanced drama with two distinct layers.
The first layer is the intimate relationship between a long term couple, with a journal entry bringing the viewer far closer to a personal recognition of the fragility of friendship than they may be prepared for. The second layer deals with any coupling, any polarized experience of two beings, or even two objects sharing something of near existential consequence.
This deeply subjective material applies equally to the ongoing challenges inherent to sustaining long term friendships or love affairs as well as to the crucial realm of loss, such as the artist’s aesthetic responses to the emotional blow inflicted by the loss of his father. Both realms are significant enough to the view that we all share the conjoined experience of longing, whether the longing for the loved one, or the longing for the lost one. Sometimes both at once.
How does an artist demonstrate and convey these parallel concerns and issues? Just like this. In Reid’s case, he has managed to channel these basic emotions into both a visual language and a medium mutation. In fact, his work embodies what it really means to walk the line between artistic mediums, those of drawing, painting, glassmaking, and installation art, and also to walk the line between two individuals, or situations, engaged in an intimate relationship.
That invisible line is identical, whether it charts the course of a marriage, or the course of a paternal partner. After all, childhood continues, no matter how old we are, until the parent is gone, and it is just as much a partnership as any other emotional transaction. It takes artistic nerve to walk that line so boldly.
The emotional content associated with the loss of the paternal partner fuels much of the experimentation he has utilized in this body of work. Creating a hybrid between the cousins of drawing and writing, and the siblings of glass and painting, his current pieces register as profound sculptural meditations on one of the most important but seldom explored aspects of nature, that of Dinergy.
What is Dinergy? Quite simply put, Dinergy is everything. It is the source of all patterns of any kind in nature, the material motive for the blending of polar opposites, through the balancing of opposing forces without which no pattern is possible. It is essentially duality writ large, and operates at an unconscious level in everything we either do or are.
Through the perpetual frisson between the edges of any opposites, whether male and female, father and son, living or dead, our roughness is polished smooth. We start out as jagged as sharp boulders but end up as smooth as river stones, all as a result of the way our experiences are absorbed and translated into art and poetry. Like the monochrome glass objects and cryptic sentences incised into many of the milky glass canvases.
In Reid’s case, he approaches the challenges of what he calls “maneuvering between dualities” in a multitude of ways and means, but always within a rigorous format which yields classical conceptual art. Merging images with text has long been a part of the modernist vernacular, as has the hyper-graphic over-abundance of self-annihilating handwriting. What’s new here though, is the use of glass as a delivery system for these ideas. Save for Duchamp, view artists felt compelled to allow the transmission of light to coincide with the transmission of notions.
Reid’s notions occur in the form of notations: journal entries in glass and graphite where the message is engulfed by the entropy of the scratched words.
Similarly, the drastically outlined drawn figures overlap with themselves as well as each other, subsuming a clear image and looking hauntingly like those of the Italian sculptor Giacometti.
This, by the way, is not meant to suggest that they resemble the drawings of Giacometti, rather that both artists descended into an existential well and drew from it poetic material which celebrates the brevity and fragility of existence, the shape of which apparently requires the same degree of graphic vulnerability and contingency.
At this stage, a third poet must be called upon to round out the chorus of voices compelled into service in the appreciation of Reid’s work: the American original, Wallace Stevens, who once defined poetry as “the search for the inexplicable…” You’ll notice he did not say the inexpressible, which would have left him nothing to say, but instead designated that which cannot be explained, thus allowing himself wide latitude for rhapsody during his search.
Reid also has a wide latitude for rhapsody, whether it is about the loss of his father, the adverse effects of which course through every scribbled word on glass, or the dynamics of his own intimate family relationship, another duality every bit as pertinent and poignant as that between life and death.
There are, of course, some rough landscapes in the territory of the human heart, the kind of rugged terrain which Rilke alludes to in the creation of all art.
Again I would stipulate, all useful art. The uses of such art? To transmit infinite variations on the meaning of life.
And the meaning of life? The meaning of life is that it ends. But what useful art does is to help us cope with and celebrate this fact, so forceful in its fleeting qualities, by providing us with the comfort of Now. Stuart Reid’s work, walking that fine line between the deeply subjective and the surprisingly universal, offers us the comfort of Now. Who could refuse that?

emblems of the enigma

EMBLEMS OF THE ENIGMA
The Art of Vessna Perunovich

Curated by Donald Brackett

“Human blood is the ink of History…”
Robert Duncan, Poet


Sometimes, when we look closely at works of art, that is, when we let our senses do the thinking and our thoughts do the feeling, we can recognize art objects for what they really might be: intimate conceptual buildings designed by artists for us to live in briefly. Briefly, but also just long enough for them to alter our perceptions, and maybe our attitudes toward life, forever.
The subtle architecture of these temporary places functions as a private theatre providing an ideal opportunity to talk about time, passage, protection, transition, security, domestic life and safe places in general, since we all share such issues. Such insights into the nature of our reality are also exactly the purpose and function of the multi-layered art works which I have curated in this retrospective survey selection called “Emblems of the Enigma: The Art of Vessna Perunovich”.


Her compellingly beautiful paintings, sculptures, mixed media installations, videos and performances are mesmerizing in the manner they use to suggest and situate our experience of these very core elements of our existence. Her collective body of work, an impressive and internationally recognized one, is part of a personal narrative with broad cross-cultural implications, especially in the methods she uses to articulate certain key ideas relating to internal and external exile, time and identity, the body and its boundaries, the home.
There was a strange Medieval Latin term that seemed to presage her style of emotive measurement and representation: perturbationes animi, a term which includes all states of feeling and thought to which human beings are dependent on the outside world. Which is to say, that part of our experience which holds us ransom to the real world. But how does one express the enigma of this, our condition?
As if in response, the surrealist poet Andre Breton once remarked that “Painting, photography and sculpture are lamentable expedients for expressing the ineffable, but they will have to do until something better comes along.”
I would like to suggest that something better has come along: a format for the manifestation of art objects which combines and merges all the above disciplines, plus a few others. I am of course, referring to the methodology of mixed media conceptual installation, a format which also includes theatre, performance, video, poetry, even the very air we breathe while in the gallery or museum.


This multi-media and multi-layered format, as evidenced by Perunovich’s own subtle conceptual architecture, allows us to explore some of the more important themes facing all of us as we navigate into a new century and a new millennium. This is the century when all prior artistic formats must coalesce.
Perunovich has managed to accumulate a remarkable series of physical insights which clarify the relativity of our reality in a sometimes harrowing and often elegant manner. She has, in her work of the last nine years particularly, constructed a personal theatre which celebrates the temporary places she conceives and designs as part of her actively engaged aesthetic. Each installation is a temporary place providing a striking scenic stage for varied contemplations, primarily on the nature of mortality and human interaction. Each is an exploration of and elaboration on the solemn geography of human limits.
A piece such as “Soul Searching” for instance, from 2007, is practically a living lament to the limits of human consciousness: an apparently bloody book
which is the sole result of all our religious projections and their frenzied toll.
As well, each individual piece is a portion of a greater sequence, almost like a diagram or equation which leads the intrepid viewer to a grasp of some natural and supernatural law managing all behaviour, or even our thoughts about behaviour. In retrospect, and as the pieces themselves demonstrate, her oeuvre has been a past puzzle to be assembled in the future. In other words, here and now.


As such, her contributions to our cross-cultural dialogue are profound in their content and charming in their context: they present a museum of dreams for our consideration, dreams which are indistinguishable from the everyday life which appears to manufacture them.
The works in this survey exhibition, whether in the form of drawings, paintings, wall works, sculptures, assemblages, video projections, or performance, are all linked by one single thread that frays off into multiple directions : the subject of shelter.
In the 2006 “Puzzle Pieces ” series for example, there is a special kind of obscure homesickness at work: are we witnessing a nostalgia for the house we were born in, for the country we used to live in, or for a home we have not even yet discovered? The answer is: yes. And there is no nostalgia quite as poignant as the nostalgia for a future we innocently hope somehow to construct from our own origins.
The puzzle pieces in question evoke an existential homesickness, they are contour maps which feel domestic, with family dynamics often reflected in symbolic house and figure shapes, but their core message still seems to be the obscure nature of human identity, reduced to emblems which register as equations or diagrams of sanctuary.



This notion, explored in the exhibition through the use of several quite different pieces from different periods and in different media, is further attached to her profound grasp of the primal idea of haven, of protected enclosure, of treeless treehouses and fortifications, of childhood concepts for seclusion in the safe place.
In short, artworks that manifest not only a subjective structure but also a universal one which is part of our shared hardware. This intricate zone of intimacy is immediately played out in all of her works chosen for inclusion in this survey show. “Continuum”, from 2000, one of my favourite sculptures, is an ideal example, in three dimensional sculptural form, of something she often also mutually explores in what I can only call a four-dimensional format. It’s a diagram of time, not just passing but morphing before our eyes.
This four-dimensionality is sometimes literally expressed, as in those media of duration such as film, video or performance, as in the case of time-based pieces like “Hanging By A Thread” from the recent Story Girls exhibit, but it is equally explored in certain physical objects which are nonetheless sculptures in four dimensions, such as the highly mutable “Couples” (1998-2007), with its ever shifting allegiance to containment. Which is just another form of shelter, after all.





While literal in the “Continuum” emblem, with its child’s legs morphing into an adult’s boots, the continuum principle per se is metaphorical in many other works, such as the compelling performance piece she executed in London in 2003, “Transitory Places: I Hug The World and The World Hugs Me Back” (a piece which has surprising resonances with Joseph Beuys’ own “I Love America and America Loves Me”.)
Her performance piece and its documentation in photographs is essentially an exploration of thresholds: spaces between people which can easily be amplified into spaces between nations. Such spaces between countries are often occupied by the ghostly presence of exiles from either one or the other, or both.
It is also a tender if unsettling emblem for the relationship between an artist and the public which views her works. As a threshold dweller, she also aptly gives credence to what Arthur Danto once identified as the basic definition of the art object: it is an embodied meaning.
All Perunovich’s works are clear examples of embodied meanings. Embodiments of shelter, displacement and diffused family origins abound in her work. This is an exhibition which searches for the why hidden in the how: because after all, in the end, our whole world is merely an empire of exiles.
“Life isn’t one straight line. Most of us have to be trans-planted, like a tree, before we blossom…” the artist Louise Nevelson once observed, another expatriate sculptor who harboured a nostalgia for the future.
The notion that foreign rather than native soil is more fruitful for us is an
intriguing one, especially since it appears to run counter to our intuitions.
Perhaps it is more the case for artists, who owe an aesthetic allegiance as well as
an ethnic or political one, and perhaps artists are always inviting us, through
their work, to consider wider and less restrictive horizons than our meager
maps allow.
Perunovich’s emblematic objects and images chart a territory quite exclusive
of political or ethnic maps. They may be territories of desire, as suggested by a
recent piece’s title, but each one is also a threshold experience outside
cartography, and all it might take for us to enter these expanded territories is the
desire to do so.
We must pass through such a threshold just as we pass through our own bodies: in wonderment and awe. And the artworks which approximate our passage, such as one of the best examples of her allegorical thresholds, the 1998 piece called “Aftermath”, in which sculpture and pedestal dissolve into one another, and a single drop of textile blood travels downward to the gravity-laden floor, always suggest a solidified flow which is literally our history in transit, our experience turning into our identity, and our identity creating our relationships.
In this kind of simple yet staggering tableau, one typical of all her output, we can see the traces of what one historian once called empathic unsettlement, the ability to put oneself in another’s position without taking the other’s place. It sanctifies the sorrow of political or social displacement common to exiles everywhere, and accomplishes what Lynne Bell once termed an “engagement of the viewer’s empathic imagination”, thus creating a “political space for critical rememberance”. Such insights are both reassuring and disconcerting at the same time.
Other expressions of continuum, the most obvious one being the repeated use of crimson fabric which suggests to me that distressing ink of history, abound throughout her thoughtful oeuvre: there is a continuous thread devoted to contemplating sanctuary, domicile, the house, and most ironically, privacy in public. The proposed purpose of art, as I see it reflected in every piece this artist has produced since her arrival in North America back in 1988, is both simple and striking: art is a means of calculating the exchange value between spirit and matter. Just as money can be considered frozen desire, the collective bodies of work by Perunovich amount to frozen spirit. The currency of consciousness itself.
“Bloodlines”, the 2006 drawing installation consisting of a narrow, almost calligraphic scroll is the most tangible example. This distressing merger between poetry and science, with its endless paper coils of dripped and scratched vital fluid, is a veritable diagram of irony: the very substance which is the core of our genealogies, our own blood, is also used to write the history of our follies on the world stage.
Perunovich’s most recent video pieces both appear to quantitatively approach the subjects of construction and destruction, as well as the entropy of structure in general, including the structure of relationships.
In “Infinite Wall”, 2007, she is seen enacting a tranquil performance of assembly and unraveling, adding and subtracting a string-based sculpture on a blood-red wall , while softly humming the tune from Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”. The task and the humming are one.
There is a striking set of visual and cognitive contrasts here which somehow manage to indict all of European history as a misadventure in mayhem concealed beneath romantic and heroic splendour. The building of walls becomes a metaphor for our entire place and role in the world, one self-evident especially in the recent history of Europe.
Meanwhile, in the video “Borderless”, also 2007, she and another figure traverse a passage that precludes meeting, they trace movements towards and away from each other before the same red wall, until they eventually meet and swoon away together in a surprisingly emotional climax. Her economy of means for conveying the feelings in such deceptively simple pieces is startling both for its austerity and its paradoxical impact on the viewer.



This is an artist who has long investigated the primal territory of the heart’s home. Her work dwells, emotionally and philosophically, on the subject of boundaries, both physical and psychic, and by yielding a shape to the invisible, she invites the viewer to dwell momentarily in their own safe place: a shelter bounded by the installation.
A shelter unbounded by the mind of the maker or the viewer; a shelter designating the territory which has no map, or is itself a map without a territory.
So it is with the construction of a conceptual building such as Perunovich’s overall body of work: a theatre for the elaboration of fleeting ideas that coalesce into an experience which is transitory, fragile, sensuous, and cerebral and yet nonetheless solid, actual and able to be occupied, briefly by our bodies, permanently by our minds, eternally by our spirits.
Some of the artworks in this survey selection strike me as being mental tattoos, which after all is just another way of appreciating the functioning of emblems in our lives.
If the visitor can slow down their visit, to a standstill if at all possible, they will come to appreciate the generous elegance and almost opulent splendour which has been devoted to making their brief passage through her installations a heartfelt one.



As a gifted artist with a compulsion to fully explore the limits and edges of her varied media, she has succeeded, by actually using Time itself as one of her raw materials, in building what the poet Goyen called a “house of breath”. She is interested in using the inherently narrative function of her art to create meaningful situations and appropriate symbols of our collective history.
An unavoidable part of that shared history is the violence of dislocation, the burden of displacement, the energy of exile, the politics of sustaining identity under threat; in fact the very conflict between the left and right sides of our brain which sentences us to life in the third dimension in the first place. Can we know more than what we think we know? Do we even know what we think? How do we reconcile the left side and right side of ourselves which causes the apparent battle between the arts and sciences?
How do we resolve apparently concrete duality itself? These are the perplexing questions her work offers to the thoughtful viewer. The works themselves are those questions. The answers, if there are any, are hidden inside each of us, in those damp places of ultimate exile.
With each new addition to her ongoing practice she has shown herself to be a unique kind of architect: designing and making buildings made of time, houses made of breath. She has persistently and consistently chosen to create emblems of the enigma. This is surely the subtle architecture of temporary places in action.

What is an emblem? Originating in the Middle Ages, when belief was
reinforced with behavioural modification, it is one of a number of symbolic
forms which bear witness to a systematic program of composing, compiling,
transposing and recording allegorical imagery.
Emblems, iconologies, symbologies, and systems of signification all share
something in common with each other and with visual artworks. They tell a
story, allegorically, visually and poetically. Most emblems originally consisted
of three portions: the lemma, or motto; an arresting visual content; and an
explanation of its meaning contained within its own structure. To that degree,
all emblems are signs in the formal sense, and as such, the artist featured in this
survey show produces an exemplary kind of allegorical sign, the structural
analysis of which using semiological methods reveals that her mixed media
works qualify as formal signs per se.
This is specially so since a sign is defined as consisting of the signifier and the
signified, and in the case of this artist, those elements are inextricably blended
and merged with the physical character of each piece of work. The signifier is
the art object, the signified is its meaning as perceived by the viewer.
In her most recent bodies of mixed media work, in my opinion also her finest to date, Vessna Perunovich continues a trajectory which explores a wide range of non-physical geographies, using a specific talent for feeling and projecting emotions which are available to everyone but which we only seem to fully recognize in the subtle otherness of formal artworks.
But regardless of the formal shape they take individually, her work as whole still conveys that startling continuity, and lends itself to the extended reverie of story-telling in order to assimilate the sustained state of intense focus and emotional rapture which runs across her entire artistic practice.
So it is that works from a decade ago manage to maintain their grip on the imagination. Works like “Tiny Deaths” and “Couples”, and “Splitting Up”,
all from 1998, share a certain vibration which is later elaborated and animated within videos, performances and other later sculptural objects. Yet each object, while also performing a role in a larger conceptual and almost theatrical tableux, or what linguists call the fabula, still nonetheless has a significant aura of its own. One that demands private and uninterrupted observation and which subsequently reveals its own little microcosm of the narrative.
“Tiny Deaths” is a small but intense sculpture consisting of a file box containing unknown contents which illuminate a Buddha hand hovering above it. One gets the feeling that a collection of tiny deaths might occur moment by moment, which also means that perhaps there is a large death surrounding many tiny lives. But we don’t know why we feel this. An empathic exile has observed it however, and we feel the impact of her sharing.
“Splitting Up” is an installation piece which captures the existential essence of relationships, whether personal or political, or both. It seems important to note that the kind of antique saw used as one of its compositional components requires two people in order to function as a cutting implement.
Uncannily, the shadows cast by the red strings which form the bed (shadows are always as important in her work as the objects which cast them) are also spookily similar to the graphic arrangement she would later explore in her “Fencescape” works nearly a decade later, with its wall made of skin cells. This is continuum writ large.
And again, strangely, yet so very powerfully, “Tiny Deaths” also relates to a recent piece done also almost a decade later, “Soul Searching”, 2007, and it resonates in a most alarming way within the entire emblematic narrative.
“Soul Searching” is an installation of two items on what can best be described as a deacon’s bench: a bowl full of red stained latex gloves, next to book saturated by red pigment floating through pin-pricked pages. The book’s message has been transmogrified into a powdery substance which resembles bloody dust.
There is a gripping relationship between “Tiny Deaths”, 1998, and “Soul Searching”, 2007. The hand that hovers above the filing drawer containing a history of who knows what miniature mayhem, is also the hand that must pick and handle the book imbued with a red powdery and blood-like substance.
Except, of course, for those intrepid enough to eschew the use of the gloves and to handle the book directly, thus taking away little microscopic fragments of the sculpture when they leave the gallery. One can almost imagine those visitors going home and needing to wash off the crimson ink, however it is not quite so easy to cleanse oneself of our history.



The conceptual fables, a word derived from fabula, which abound in Perunovich’s work are as elusive as dreams and as subtle as sentient air. There is a reason for this, which also helps clarify their sometimes layered meanings.
Maps of meaning are walls constructed around the inexplicable fact of our being here, and her works tell us: look how they can be built and destroyed so easily. Like Nevelson’s insight into the nourishing aspects of the non-indigenous, Perunovich’s mixed media pieces celebrate a kind of anti-aboriginal stance, meaning that they focus on the virtues of being somewhat unsettled.
Our world is rife with references to the comforts of home and hearth: to settle in, to settle ourselves, to avoid being unsettled, since settlement itself is the gauge by which we measure our distances from the nomadic to the supposedly civilized state permanence.
But all of Perunovich’s works suggest that permanence is illusory, something we merely imagine for ourselves in order to carry on, and that the unique state of unsettlement is far more in keeping with our true condition. Needless to say, such artworks are by their very nature, somewhat unsettling.
That fragile membrane between the artist and her work, between the work and the public viewer and between the broader political and cultural discourses that result, are the key factors in what I see as this artist’s main cartographic function : art objects as a system for conducting metaphysical measurements.

That threshold, between the artist’s experience and the public’s recognition of their own, is where the sign becomes active and the emblem is invoked.
Certain artists and their work seem ideally suited to the rarified task of making such spiritual measurements, the kind that become emblematic of the enigma of both our existence and the identities that encapsulate it.
Some even manage to approach and communicate these ineffable sensations with a nearly shocking sense of clarity: boldly inviting the invisible to materialize before our eyes. Perunovich does this through a concerted emphasis on what the ancient Greeks referred to as anamnesis, the power of memory to memorialize itself through a kind of unconscious mourning.
Her work of the last twelve years or so has been quietly building a consistent language of images and objects designed to achieve her aesthetic agenda with maximum psychological impact. This overall continuity is of three major sorts: thematic continuity, in terms of the ideas explored; material continuity, in terms of the media and objects utilized, and psychic continuity, in terms of the personal feelings she is able to convey within a wider public and political context.





Since we all share some degree of complicity in today’s disintegrating world, we are able to actively enter into a dialogue with her work which results in unearthing the overall narrative, the story which her art tells us. Or rather, stories. The voice of her visual art, like the voice of an author, remains constant, while the stories that swirl through that voice shift focus and develop a meta-narrative, one based on what I believe is a compelling purpose. In her case, the stories and their purpose are one in the same.
As an artist, one of her roles is to provide a kind of evidence, for something which might pass unnoticed if not for a prolonged reverie state: evidence of the melting of time, the dislocation of space, the dissonance of mind, the mutability of self and other.
Perunovich’s aesthetic agenda, and the works that make it manifest, is strongly aligned with this kind of awareness, the realization that the once solid ground of history has become a softer, swamp-like environment. Her works are veritable diagrams of transition as the only permanent state. They frequently, if unconsciously, also mirror the building and tearing down of walls between people.
Often, her videos are also live documentations of the construction, deconstruction or performative aspects which otherwise silently reside in the static realm of her drawings, paintings and sculptures. They animate the emotions relating to building and destroying, using themselves as emblems for that special kind of entropy that accompanies every single move forward through transitional states.
Her pieces are the legible and visible patterns which reflect the wide range of feelings from fear and frivolity, to fury and fantasy, to exile and return, to enclosure and freedom, to living and dying. From the psychic dissonance arising from displacement, to the strange sad joy of reinstatement as a citizen of sentience, the works themselves are signposts on a pilgrimage enacted to both ritualize exile and to embody the entropy of exile.
Two such signposts are the related series of newer pieces called “Currency”, a video installation consisting of an apparent spill of blood spreading across a white void, projected behind one of her familiar elastic fences, and “History Repeating”, also from 2007, a sequence of panel paintings which capture the same spill in two dimensions.
Both appear to be daring time capsules which contain visual evidence, almost in a scientific format, of one of the principal messages behind much of her work, a feeling most accurately summed up in a line of poetry from Robert Duncan: Human blood is the ink of history.
I like to think of her art objects, whatever their medium, as metaphysical mneomics (another manifestation of anamnesis) as devices designed to help us memorize the repetitive feelings provoked by our déjà vu like existence. The patterns are ritualized in her artworks, since she manages to perform the role of empath so well, registering and calibrating the emotions associated with recurring parts of life and making contour maps of their topography. So that future travelers will remember our own brief journeys here.
And ironically, continuum itself, the link between two things or a series of things which blend into one another so gradually that we can’t detect when one becomes the other, is one of her principal subjects.
Oddly enough, those same child’s leg’s and shoes were also clearly featured in another incarnation as the focal point of her video made some seven years later, “Hanging By A Thread”, in which an unseen girl (actually the artist herself) plays on a playground swing surrounded by the unnerving sounds of screaming seagulls.
Perunovich asks us to consider the possibility of a future where emotions, and the enigmatic emblems which embody them, can be studied as if they were music. The reason? Because this is music. Frozen music. In a very real way, she engages in the orchestration of objects which contain the preserved energy of human emotions. Like the crystalline amber of certain ancient trees, these works memorialize those moments in which our emotions start to throw their weight around.
Two of the best examples of the empathic functioning in her work are found in “Blood and Belonging” and “Towers of Belief”, from 2004 and 2005 respectively, in which the barriers between human beings are reduced to the stark emblems of both simple walls and religious symbols. Such walls are always manifestations of human conflict, first internal and then externalized into the environment. Their deceptive simplicity conceals a gigantic sorrow.

In the end, the symbols are also walls of course, but of a different sort, walls of meaning imposing inclusion and exclusion onto spiritual experience. The obvious impact of using the cross, crescent and star images of the three most conflicted and yet most intimately connected religions is a way of creating a head-on collision with our most precious and dangerous delusions.
This must be what supreme disillusionment feels like, perhaps expressed so succinctly in a series like “Dark Tales”, when engaged in the sort of psychological weightlifting that I suggest Perunovich’s work represents. The presence of three key elements, the blood spill, the grey figure adjacent, and the chalkboard with erasures, suggests to me that the tales are dark because we never learn our lessons from history.
In her case especially, Perunovich manages to capture something fleeting that often artists overlook, or underlook: the sensation of what it feels like to engage in ritualistic looking. According to Merleau Ponty, our enigma is that our bodies simultaneously see and are seen, thus what we use for looking outward can also be used for looking inward, at ourselves.
In this regard, Perunovich has an exemplary grasp on what it means to try to grapple with inchoate and sometimes incomprehensible feelings and sensations associated with being alive. This is why I have coined the phrase which serves as the title for this survey exhibition: emblems of the enigma. She regularly produces emblems of the emotions provoked by our responses to the enigma of our existence.
But Perunovich, while contouring the emotional content slightly, definitely insists that the texture of emotions in her works remains as rough and abrasive as they need to be to call attention to what she wants us to feel and see.
Such a subtle study of both the dynamics and stasis of human interaction will undoubtedly be developed more concretely by science in the future. For us still living in the present, we have the presence of artworks such as both the “Wasted Youth” and Vicious Cycle” series from 2007, each one a harrowing sequence of advertisements for the abandonment of restraint in portraiture, seeking to portray people at a sub-humus level with a shattering intimacy that goes far beyond mere personality or character.
Her art objects do not necessarily denote meanings, they don’t, in other words, point at something and describe it. But they are connotations of meanings, suggesting that they can wear the conceptual clothing necessary to the job at hand. The job of expressing inexpressible feelings for things that are inexplicable.
Amongst these many diverse objects in mixed media and interdisciplinary contexts, I am delighted to report that there is also still a vestige of a very old and even ancient world in her overall sensibility. I think painting is still very important indeed, especially in our era, and I was delighted to discover that in addition to exploring her fabula in videos, installations, performances, drawings and conceptual, somewhat neo-surrealist sculpture, she has also produced a substantial body of painted work.
It too has a consistency enhanced by the fact that they are frequently sequential and serial, so it was a great pleasure to be able to situate her paintings within the overall scope of her output, and to show through selection, how the paintings further manifest a kind of emblematic cartography of feelings.
Of course, even though she still embraces the desire for painted images, she does so in her own distinctive manner, eschewing the use of traditional art materials in favour of her own palette of ingredients more often associated with the building trade.
Not surprisingly perhaps, given her interest in the drama of domesticity as it originates in the home and extends out into the world of society and politics, she produces her paintings with industrial housing materials, such as plaster and house paint, as opposed to the pretty tools of the trade in former times.
Each medium she uses is enlisted for a specific purpose, and the trajectory of this exhibition travels smoothly from its cardinal points of Home, Exile, Separation, Transition, Refuge and Sanctuary. The final suggestion being that home is in our heads, rather than necessarily in the soil of the homeland.
Beginning to think of the mind and spirit as a kind of psychic soil can help us come to grips with the pressures implicit in projecting and overly identifying with strictly physical geographies. It is, after all, the non-physical geographies of the imagination which are being mapped so incessantly by this gifted artist.


Here are documents in a dramatic tongue which give witness to things both horrid and hellish, while also being imbued with a poetic elegance and beauty that disorients us long enough to awaken from our nightmares, which in the end, might be the true purpose of all important art. History, another poet once remarked, is a dream from which we cannot awake.
Vessna Perunovich traces the stains from the ink of history in works that approach the threshold of awareness and situate us there gently, but with passion. After all, inexplicable doesn’t necessarily mean inexpressible.

Donald Brackett
Curator/Critic

The exhibition Emblems of the Enigma traveled across Canada to six public museums: Peterborough, Mississauga, Cambridge, Algoma, Halifax and Kelowna, and is accompanied by a handsomely illustrated catalogue.

EARWITNESS:

Looking at Sound with Finnbogi Petursson


By DONALD BRACKETT





“One can look at seeing, one cannot listen to hearing…”

Marcel Duchamp







What do we mean when we characterize this artist as one who captures the shape of time? First and foremost, that he draws with it as a raw material within his medium, that of sculptural installation utilizing mixed media, and predominantly focused on the frozen music of pure sound as it colonizes pure space.
By “drawing” with sound through projections of its pure activity as a sine wave, he modifies the space in and around his pieces in subtle yet dramatic ways which clearly chart the trajectories of time through the experiences of light, shadow and silence.



He reveals the shape of time in a manner remarkably similar to the musical compositions of Morton Feldman, even though he is not approaching his subject or theme from a strictly musical perspective but rather through one that engages us in the phenomenology of our perceptions.
Strictly speaking, he is most concerned with the architecture of perception itself, especially that of the threshold where sound comes from and disappears back to, and from where light invades darkness before retreating into itself again. Silence and darkness, light and sound, are the four principal elements with which he is choreographing his beautifully compelling sculptures.
It’s not very often that one gets a chance to say that an artistic presence with the stature of Duchamp, at whose shrine I regularly offer the aesthetic adoration he truly does deserve, is wrong or misguided. But here is just such a rare opportunity.
The artist who taught us how to “look at seeing”, by looking through rather than merely at his subtle objects, surprised me when I encountered the above quote about looking and listening, especially considering that one would expect a keen intellect and heart such as his to be able to easily shift to a parallel medium and explore similar ideas or effects within it.
But he was well known not to have a strong interest in music per se, even though his “Musical Erratum”, from 1913, was one of the seminal monuments to chance operations in the previous century, and he was known to follow no musical innovations in particular, apart from the later phase of his life when he was encountered by such musical titans as John Cage. So it struck me as doubly ironic that someone of his obvious powers would declare that one cannot “listen to hearing”.
But then again, he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to both view, listen to and experience the highly imaginative mixed media provocations of one of the artists whose work he himself might have made possible as a progenitor: the Icelandic interdisciplinary sound-sculptor, Finnbogi (pronounced fin-buoy) Petursson.
This 47 year old artist was born in Reykjavik, and he represented Iceland at the 2001 Venice Biennale, but he may just as well have been representing Neptune, so subtle, thought provoking and utterly original are his diverse works exploring the borderline realms of sound, sight and physical proportion.
He not only allows us to look at seeing, as well as listen to hearing, he most crucially and effectively allows us to hear seeing and to look at sound. That is what makes him more than just your average interdisciplinary, postmodern and drastically mixed media artist, no matter how gifted: his territory is one that operates on a liminal level, at the interstitial zone “in between” the five senses and their objects. His installations are a kind of spectral evidence that charts the trajectory of time by tracing the effects of sound on space.
His elegantly haunting works, which Gregory Volk once astutely referred to as “part physics and part poetics” are environmental envelopes of subtle yet powerful sensations. They are therefore capable of providing access to a realm which might otherwise be inaccessible to us: the invisible realm where contradiction ceases to be opposition.
That realm is one I can only refer to as the fourth dimension, and I suggest that all his artworks, as well as the aesthetic philosophy and physical science that informs them, are four dimensional in nature. They have more to do with the mechanics of time and duration than with the customary physical processes of illusory permanence usually celebrated by sculptural objects.
Iceland is a mysterious and unknown place to most of us. Rekjavik? Apart from the fact that Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky there in the early 70’s, and that Bjork’s apocalyptic pop music was born there in the 90’s, it is a strange and exotic locale indeed. And yet something in its Nordic fabric has also produced a very gifted and deeply moving artist whose whole enterprise seems founded on showing us the invisible, and to letting us listen to the songs of the unseen.
In 1950 Louis Goldstein observed that Feldman “came to think of the essence of sound as a moldable phenomenon in and of itself, and separate from the other elements of music, such as pitch and rhythm. In his mind, sound, with its density and timbre, could have its own shape, design and poetic metaphor.”
This concept of sound “separated from the other elements” is the point of departure for all of Petrusson’s highly expressive and exquisitely crafted aural objects. The ongoing aim of these works is, like Feldman’s sonic environments, to project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric, except that Petursson often projects sounds literally through time and at objects, be they a solid concrete wall or a fragile bowl of shimmering water. The resulting collisions are what form the basis for his elegant works.
Those afflicted with chronophobia, the fear of the passage of time, will find his works both compelling and unsettling, since they are literally earwitness reports on the temporal territory, contained within concise and sophisticated
theatrical stages created exclusively for the representation of the fourth dimension.
In each of his progressively more intricate and subtle installations, he is exploring sound’s own shape, design and its essence as a poetic metaphor. Goldstein has also remarked presciently that, “With all the attention placed on the liberation of sound in 20th Century music, a more profound and far-reaching liberation has sometimes been ignored: the liberation of time.” That notion is a key to the temporal landscapes produced by Petursson in his rigorous practice.
Just as advanced visual artists have moved beyond the idea of the object as a subject, hybrid mixed media artists such as Petursson are moving toward treating time, by using sound, as an object. The results are both intellectually challenging and endless entertaining.
This tendency to focus on the liminal and interstitial is not a new or recent development in his quite mature body of work over the years. As far back as the 1985 installation called “Certain Rhythm For Space” in the appropriate named Time-Based Arts in Amsterdam, he commenced what appears to be a two decade love affair with sounds that interact with spaces in a site-specific manner. This method is one which uncovers the compositional process as it was most aptly described by Goldstein on Feldman: the formal and substantive essentializing of all action. This kind of composition essentializes the flow of time.
But Finnbogi Petursson is not a musician per se, and I don’t agree with the often confining designation of sound-sculptor, preferring to see him instead as an innately gifted visual artist working within site-specific installation formats in order to render the reverie of the invisible dimension that begins where our fingertips end. The frozen music he creates is more akin to the paint that a visual artist like Rothko utilized to strip the sublime of its physicality: both are four-dimensional artists in my estimation.
For “Certain Rhythm In Space”, the artist placed an old fashioned gramophone with no record on it in the middle of the floor, connected to ten loudspeakers surrounding it on the enclosed walls of the space.
Cardboard tubes of varying lengths and widths were placed either above or below the speakers, funneling dramatically different tones back and forth across the room. The gramophone controlled and evened out the rhythmic interval between the modulation control and each successive loudspeaker, sending 24v dc current tones, coloured by the different tubes, out toward and into the audience
This was an audience, as one description put it, which was experiencing a flow of rhythms while also being completely unable to locate or relate to their origin. At its most basic level, all rhythm consists of time and change. At its most intriguing level, that of interacting sound waves and brain waves, Petursson’s work permits us to become part of the rhythmic space rather than merely observing it as spectators. This was also one of the earliest examples of a process which he called “sound drawings”.
For his high profile debut at the Venice Biennale, Petursson constructed “Diabolus”, a rectangular tunnel about 16 meters long which protruded from the Icelandic pavilion and could easily have been mistaken for a hoarding structure until one entered its inviting mouth and discovered tantalizing tones pulling you further into the interior.
At the other end, the tunnel narrowed down into a vertigo inducing 50 cm wide and 2 meter high square organ pipe. Within it was embedded a low frequency loudspeaker producing a sequence of tones which triggered the air pump blowing into the organ, which in turn emits a second tone that makes manifest an interference wave of 17hz, a wave which was once referred to as a “diabolus” in ancient music.
This work was clearly an experiment in both the architecture of perceptions, as well as the actual architecture of the physical dimensions and proportions necessary to create that perception.
In the Water-Tanks piece from 2005, “Water-Earth”, he utilized water and light, with fluctuating 7.8hz interference wave, making for an environmental
Sculpture of considerable evocative power. Like many of his works, the use of lights and sound is similar in spirit to the Californian artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell, both of whom create subtle environments from minute modifications of the atmosphere through scrims and apertures but his use of sounds as his principal medium is quite unique.
“Current” 2005, is a powerful concrete wall structure with sound waves bouncing on and off it to produce a low rumble throughout the bleak surrounding landscape. Steel wind, stone and sinus tone are employed to manufacture an experience of viewing which is at once also an experience of the poetics of space, structure, sound and form.
“Border” 2006, was a subtle series of light beams passing through water atop a columnular wall structure evoking sculptural plinths and pedestals but supporting on its top only a shimmering display of rays. 4hz-11hz waves in succession created a series of different splintered liquid light shadows that produced a drama quite surprising given the work’s deceptive simplicity.
In a piece like “Sphere”, 2006, the sound drawing method is made somewhat more literal by introducing the additional mediums of light and water in order to visually project the effects of different frequencies of sound on the surface of water as a means of demonstrating ephemeral patterns which are normally undetectable.
While with the installation “Untitled”, 2006, his intention is even more subtle, working with the silence of perfectly proportioned and wall mounted black box sculptures with hollow interiors which, like the echo chamber of a guitar or lute, mirrored any ambient sounds produced within the gallery walls themselves.
With perhaps characteristic Icelandic modesty, Finnbogi Petursson had the ideal response when I asked him about Duchamp’s quote, “one can look at seeing, one cannot listen to hearing…” and he replied, “I’ve been trying to disprove Duchamp all my career but I’m not sure that I will succeed….”
I have news for him : he already has. Especially since his next upcoming projects include works which further explore the haptic-optic-aural realm in pieces utilizing water, fire, air, steam, sound, electronics and real time. Thus we are able, through his intersession, to witness both seeing and listening in a most alluring and charming manner. One which would have pleased and amused Duchamp, in the most Duchampian sense of the word amusement.
And perhaps most appropriate of all, his most recent piece in Reykjavik
Involves a radio station broadcasting silence on FM 106.5. Its important to note that they are not just broadcasting nothing, meaning the raw air space between sounds, voices or music, rather they are broadcasting “silence”, the absence of sound, an empty envelope whose letter has been lost or surrendered.
It is hard to believe its almost 80 years since the surrealist master Andre Breton complained that: “Painting, photography and sculpture are lamentable expedients in order to express the ineffable, but they will have to do until something better comes along.”
Something better has indeed come along, and its name is Finnbogi Petursson.
By crafting diagrams of silence, before and after it is interrupted by sound, he allows each of us to be earwitnesses to time’s invisible unfolding.

LIVING WITH LIMITS

By Donald Brackett


“Universal Design is an approach to the design of all products and environments
to be as usable as possible by as many people as possible regardless of age, ability
or situation. Terminology and meanings differ from one country to another and often
reflect each nation's societal values, but the common goal of social inclusion transcends
national laws, policies, and practices.”

Universal Design Education




We all live with some sort of limits, usually ones so manageable that we barely consider them. But some people encounter profound limits which are specific to their life situation, and which most of us can barely imagine. While I was working as the project coordinator for a cultural group called the Arts Access Coalition, I was able to learn first hand about how flexible the word limit really is by curating an exhibition that addressed the issue of universal design through merging disabled and able bodied artists whose work explored that very theme.
Though I learned a great deal from that group about some of our built-in design assumptions, it was not until a close friend of mine recently developed ALS that I discovered how radically her environment needed to be altered in order to make it possible for her to maintain a relatively independent mode of living while facing her personal challenges. Seeing her requirements shift with her condition illustrated dramatically how vital is the need for a more inclusive and ongoing sensitivity to this area of design research.
The mandate of this design education approach is to situate universal design not as a social trend but as an enduring design philosophy that originates from the belief that the broad range of human ability, from able to disabled, is ordinary and not unique. Promoters of this strategy rightly believe that universal design accommodates people with disabilities, older people, children, and myriads of others who are non-average, in a way that is not stigmatizing and easily benefits all end users.
According to the Universal Design Education Site, designing for a broad range of users from the beginning of the process can increase usability of an environment or product without significantly increasing its cost. It results in easier use for everyone and it reduces the need for design modifications later when abilities or circumstances change.
They point out that worldwide, a confluence of factors is driving the demand for more universally usable products, environments, and services, including the competitive and global nature of modern business, the flourishing communications technology industry, the international disability movement, and the rapidly growing aging and disabled populations all over the world.

Their site states that: “The Principles of Universal Design and their guidelines were developed by a working group of architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers as part of a project coordinated by the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University. The seven Principles that describe characteristics that make designs universally usable are: equitable and flexible use, perceptible information and low physical effort, size and space for approach to end use.”
The School of Design at George Brown College is involved in a new research project devoted to exploring the most effective ways of helping people overcome their limits while still living at home. The Health eHome project also assists the rest of us in overcoming our own inherent limitations when it comes to being more inclusive and embracing difference.
Co-coordinator Monica Contreras offers a very personal perspective: "When I was 18 I wanted to become an Architect to improve the world, and the Healthy e Home project is a direct extension of the conviction that we are entrusted as creative thinkers, problem solvers and builders of the environments that we inhabit: to bring down the barriers to ensure full enjoyment, true experience and dignity for all rather than just the able"
From July 2009 until July 2014, this project will be actively engaged in finding the most optimum ways to ensure equity in this major social issue. The Health eHome project is a continuation of the Canühome project created by the Institute without Boundaries (IwB) at George Brown College in 2008, which received a Gold Booth Award at IIDEX/Neocon 2008 while on display at the Direct Energy Centre in Toronto. This 850 square foot model home showcased the latest in sustainable and universal design to thousands of visitors. The five year project will be conducted in collaboration with Origin Retirement Communities, Saint Elizabeth Health Care, The Town of Markham and CMHC.
Building on existing research and design development, Health eHome will explore the possibility of an ecologically sound residence that will allow Canadians with sensory, mobility and cognitive impairments to continue living independently in their own homes. The Health eHome will investigate the processes for monitoring inhabitants’ health, expanding their mobility and longevity by connecting residents to remote services and resources through smart design and technologies.
Research and new insights will lead to advances in home care approaches, housing design and technologies that will promote and support healthy living, safety and quality-of-life for residents. The research will be led by Luigi Ferrara, MRAIC, OAA, Director, GBC School of Design and Monica Contreras, OAA, Professor, GBC, IwB. Students from design, health sciences, as well as construction, architectural and engineering technology will be engaged as research associates in this project.
Anna Milan, an IWB student and Research Associate on the project, has identified flexibility as one of the key elements: “The Health eHome will be a home that assists you through different stages of your life, from infancy to old age, by being embedded with special programs to restore and prevent physical deterioration and provide supportive systems, including palliative care. Within the different life stages, permanent, temporary or reoccurring problems may arise, and the The Health eHome will discover new design opportunities and place solutions into technologies, objects and spaces to maintain safety, dignity and access.”

“It is a house that includes the following integrated technology solutions: Intelligent Environment - a layer of the Health eHome will provide reminders and guidance through daily activities; Adaptive Assets - a layer of the Health eHome will learn from your needs and behaviour, which are in constant change, thus allowing your home to adjust to special needs; Ubiquitous Sensing - a layer of the Health eHome will translate your activities and needs through sensory adaptations, and these will be incorporated into the physical environment; Communication Improvements - a layer of the Health eHome will help you connect with people and the environment
outside of your home; Remote Monitoring - a layer of the Health eHome will identify unusual habits, unhealthy situations and call for help when needed.”
The overall objectives of this research are aimed at developing ongoing methods for effective management of home living by following user-centered design principles to integrate smart technologies and design strategies into the home environment seamlessly, so that those with sensory, mobility and cognitive impairments can experience a safer and healthier environment that supports independent living. A secondary objective is to establish best practices for commercial use and to develop educational materials (via an e-learning course) for Health eHome users and assistive workers.
The Health eHome project also has the potential for major commercial outputs, including: methods for retrofitting existing homes to accommodate aging in place and inter-generational care-giving; networked appliances and devices to assist eating, bathing, and sleeping; digital interaction and display technology for the home that augment health;
collected ethnographic and human factors data that may be commercialized; and
home designs that can assist in the development of integrated design solutions for new domestic and continuing care projects.
In other words, home is where the health is.

INTERIOR PARAMOUR:

The Abstract Paintings of Michael Davidson


By Donald Brackett



I.



“What fragments thought is not the handling of solids
in space, but the dispersal of decisions in time…”

Gaston Bachelard,
The Dialectic of Duration, 1950




Consider this a letter from the outpost, that hinterland place where painting still occupies its familiar majestic posture and still looms large on the horizon of creative possibilities when it comes to expressing the ineffable. The great surrealist Andre Breton once remarked that painting, photography and sculpture were lamentable expedients for exploring the ineffable meaning of existence, but that they would just have to do until something better comes along. He said that in 1927, and nothing better has yet come along. But everyone is in such a hurry to move on already.

But Michael Davidson is not in a hurry to move on, in fact, quite the contrary, he wants us all to slow down long enough to recognize that the essence of painting, and especially the psychic landscape of abstraction, can never be replaced. This is simply because it is a map of the human mind.
Davidson went to that place early in his career, and he has had the astute intuition to remain there, calmly waiting for the return of the culture’s orbit into that very richly textured canvas hinterland. In painting, patience pays off.
His first painting, executed over 24 years ago, was a still life, with imposing Morandi-like vessels starkly positioned in almost empty space. Its somewhat charred and scarred surface rendered the objects with a tender terror, almost as if the attempt to capture their visual essence was a heretical gesture in what was then a broadly neo-expressionist phase in artmaking practice globally.
He has continued to explore the economy of embodiment but more by focusing his attention on both the tightly contained interior of objects, and the looseness of the vast exterior around them, having dispensed with the illusory skin of the vessels themselves and concentrating instead on the identical space which is both inside and outside those and all other objects.

His principal subject and theme therefore, is the nature of being in space among objective things, but without the things themselves represented and without us to interfere with their nature by observing too strenuously, or in the art of painting, by depicting too exactly. This is the Anti-Vermeer.
Bachelard made his comments about the importance of time in 1950, at the height of the supremacy wielded by abstraction around the world. In that same year, a New York painter named Bradley Walker Tomlin also produced a unique insight into these same matters, one well worth considering here:
“One can believe in paintings, as one can believe in miracles, for paintings, like miracles, possess an inner logic which is inescapable. But this again is to believe after the fact (of painting), which is merely to believe in the concrete. In spite of the production of masterpieces, art itself reads as infinitely mysterious…” It was a great thing to be a painter in 1950.
Michael Davidson believes in paintings, and in their mystery, and this is what his do for us and what they show to us: the surprising surreality of high-impact images but without recourse to either or conscious or unconscious representations.



Since I maintain that historical abstraction was the final flowering of the poetic descent into the unconscious of which the entire twentieth century has multiple examples in every sphere of activity, this same strangely stable surreality in which we have all lived since 1900 has only one truly accurate form of adequate expression: the abstract image which comes so close to visual music that there is barely a way of differentiating between them.
This is so, largely because as classical modernist expressions, both the paintings and the music say exactly the same thing: you are listening to music, you are watching paint explain life, which is far more interesting than watching it dry its tears.
A good place to start examining this marriage between the physical and the musical could be Davidson’s painting “Strode Lounge” from 2001.
It isn’t technically necessary to know that this lounge located in Chicago was the site of some of jazz master Sonny Rollins’ most forceful and reflective sax solos, since the visual notes hovering in dank space before the viewer simply come rushing toward us like pure chunks of decomposing sounds and visions, no matter how one looks at it. It’s an insistent painting.


However, once one does know the reference, it provides a kind of narrative structure not unlike knowing something of Caravaggio’s personal life, which was also hidden in his own dark images. Strangely, “Strode Lounge” feels like it could have been made by Caravaggio, if he had been locked in Plato’s cave and invited to decorate its dim walls with a penknife.
The painting’s unknown source of light in the upper centre has all the bearing and demeanor of a classical chiaroscuro effect, but with only our own imagination to illuminate its secret depths, since its space is in a perpetual state of flux. And if the floating forms are not musical in nature, which they might not be to a viewer unfamiliar with jazz, they are still strikingly physical and are part of a recurring Davidson language which often focuses on detached glyphs, calligraphic fragments, pummeled numerals, flayed space, and other marked attempts to articulate the void.
“Strode Lounge” is an ideal point of departure, since it also so clearly presents a recurring theme and subject in most of this artist’s work: the romantic (in the best sense of the word) desire to depict the vital void at the heart of the forest of things. It is into the interior of this forest that the voyage of these paintings takes us, on an odyssey of amorphous transitional states: deep into the place where painting’s interior paramour resides.
A contemporary artist like Davidson, who has been slowly perfecting a personal and gestural language of absent images, while using a highly focused syntax in pigment for a quarter century now, has also been looking and listening carefully, and well, to what classical abstraction has taught us all, listening to its most important lesson in fact: there is no end to its infinite variations and compelling ways of expressing emotional temperatures. It seems abstraction is often the only language capable of conveying sentience.
Coherence, continuity and time’s melting presence, these are the principal qualities and the primary theme depicted in Davidson’s often simple yet sumptuous works. They are diagrams of duration. Nothing says concrete duration like a good painting, mostly because paintings are all about duration, even though the best of them are timeless.
A good painting is the result of a long process of decantation, wherein the painter is the decanted substance. The sensation of time leaking out of the canvas of a master metaphysician is a truly remarkable experience to encounter, and one which leaves us breathlessly feeling that we have experienced our own entropy. This is of course, one of the crucial side-effects of sentience: knowing it is woefully temporary.


At first glance perhaps, a painting such as “Black Star” from 2003, might appear to be about entropy, its core having been emptied of the contents which we are used to seeing in the illusory windows of pictures. But what if instead it has undergone quite the reverse kind of process and is about to burst open from a fullness so taut it cannot contain an image?
“Black Star”, also notable of course for its utter absence of darkness and for performing an ironic twist on the void of a celestial black hole, contains a different sort of physical music in its clenched pale hands. Rather than a flurry of jazz notes, it almost presents a visual parallel to something known as “discreet music”, an invention of the ambient master Brian Eno.
Its key, so well exemplified here in paint, is the ability to convey intense feeling and content at a very low volume, almost at the threshold of hearing, or in this case, the borderline of seeing. As such, it captures the essence of another musical parallel, the notion of high statistical density: a near overwhelming sensation of tightly-packed information which takes actual time to become acclimatized to, not unlike an exotic geography which only appears to be minimal on the surface from the sky.


In fact, Davidson’s images are quite the opposite of minimal, and even those paintings which appear to contain a frozen tundra of whiteness, such as the aptly titled “Glacier” from 2007, are loaded to the maximum limit with subtle gestures that speak on a grand scale. Though they speak in a very quiet voice, what they actually say is very commanding, since absence is an even more obvious metaphor for the forest of things than is presence.
“Glacier” also is only empty at first glance, and only snowy at first glance. Upon reflection, the true subject of this painting feels more like the term “glacial”, the slowness of geological time compared to the frenzy of our human time scale. Underneath its brittle shell there seems to be an exhausted landscape engulfed by the void, the only place where there is no time, and the place towards which all the best abstraction tends.
If “Black Star” is the shimmering landscape of Eno, then “Glacier” might be the indeterminate landscape of John Cage. Tossed, as if untroubled. But in between these two signposts to emptiness, a very full and corporeal painting called “Zen Crusher”, from 2006, introduces quite another resonating theme. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. In this opulent painting, as filled as the others are empty, a single calligraphic gesture attempts to forestall the flow of lava about to engulf us.
We are attracted to the ambiguity of its somewhat naughty title, enjoying the unknown angle at which the tongue pokes into the cheek: is it a zen crusher or a zen crusher….is it zen being crushed or is it zen doing the crushing? This would seem to make it qualify as a visual haiku, a phrase that I recall using back in 1997, when I described his work as providing a new way to contemplate space. It still does.
Like all contemplation, the kind perfected over many hours and years of concentrated effort devoted to the task at hand eventually begins to pay off in discreet but telling signs of success. And so it is with painting, as is demonstrated so clearly here: if you resist the temptation to give up and say it’s day is done, and instead, you put your sore shoulder to the grindstone and paint, the results can be equally revealing.
The painting mine-shaft still has plenty of ore left in it, perhaps especially so, since back in circa 1961 (approximately) when everyone started to make the mad dash away from abstraction, they obviously left some sizeable nuggets and veins laying around.



But the painting experiment ended far too quickly, lasting only about sixty or seventy years, and it ended artificially, in keeping perhaps with the impatience of the modern world. They told us the zenith had been reached by the first few generations of abstract painters, say from Kandinsky and Malevich on to Rothko, Reinhardt and Newman, and we all believed them.
But abstraction’s demise was mostly just part of a cultural advertising campaign for forward movement, and just like the second and third and fourth generations of jazz, there was so much more to be explored through a continued dedication to the program.
Why didn’t this happen during the end of the first golden age of abstraction, did we run out of shovels? Was it a sudden fear of the overwhelming aroma from the sublime coming up in steam jets from the cavernous cracks down there?
But still somehow, exposed and abandoned, these same veins have recently been revisited by painters six generations later, new painters with a new accent, and more importantly, a new dialect for the classical language.
Painters like Michael Davidson. Paintings like “Zen Crusher”. But these are not mere vestiges of a more vertiginous time in history, these are veritable diagrams of the vertigo itself!

In Davidson’s successive bodies of work there is the obscure but discernible sense of a pilgrimage of sorts, of stepping onto a territory which some of us believe is almost sacred: the territory of the belief that it is possible to reach a peak moment of flow and in one expressionistic and emotionally abstract gesture to capture the meaning of life, at that particular time and in that particular place.
Some of his anti-images however, seem to so effortlessly arrive at a transpersonal and universal place, one perhaps laden with both archetypal structure and mythical posture, that it is easy to slip into the reverie they offer: the tale of all tomorrow’s travels, the nomadic exile on a quest for either the golden fleece or the golden painting.
The search for the golden painting is something built into the very dna of modernist thinking, even though there are many of them, and in varying shades of gold. In Davidson’s case, the search takes the form of a pressing physical metaphor, the myth of the wanderer, and though it unfolds in the classical manner of an epic poem within a Homeric cycle of perpetual absence and arrival, it also naturally assumes the physical shape and emotional texture of a classically modernist aesthetic venture.


II.
“The lamp stands vigil, therefore it is vigilant. And the
narrower the ray of light, the more vigilant it becomes….”


Arthur Rimbaud 1870




At least two Davidson paintings are definitely based on multiple layers of mythical content from the classical age and they yet also perfectly mirror the modernist myth of the golden painting. Both “Argonaut” and “The Lamia” are drastically different applications of a connected myth to radical hand and mind gestures, with indeterminacy and discontinuity being rendered in the classical expressionist manner.
Coincidentally one of my favourite of the heroic Greek myths, Jason and The Argonauts tells a section of the Odyssey adventure relating to social intrigue between the gods and certain mortals. Jason assembled fifty heroes for a perilous voyage aboard The Argo to the fabled Colchis in search of a legendary golden fleece, which was chronicled by Appolonius in the 3rd century BC.
To be an Argonaut is thus to be in the company of heroic figures such as Heracles and Orpheus, whose harp helped drown out the Sirens’ hypnotic wails. But like its namesake in mythology, Davidson’s painting of “The Lamia” is an intuitive representation of what happens to a shared fragment of the collective unconscious when it is passed from culture to culture the way children pass on a saying to the next person, and the next, until it has changed irrevocably from its origins. It transmits its myth like a message sent through time.
“The Lamia” is therefore not a persona, not even a personification of feared forces, but rather a cluster or a constellation of myths moving around an empty centre, an evacuated core. Absence and abandonment, exile and return, time and its bleeding, are all that remains of the burned out edifice which spawned the mighty migration of meanings associated with the myth’s crucible, and with its formation down below.
Like Bachelard in his examination of poetic images, Davidson is devoted to portraying the dialectic of duration, showing how it functions in our perceptual and conceptual lives, and how the process of time’s dispersal is even more important than the management of objects in space.


The forest of things we move through, though positioned in space, is much more vitally anchored in time. The story of paint is the story of time, it’s as simple as that. Compelling portraits of time’s mask-like face also occur in a many other works by this steadfast painter. Each new painting resembles time peeling back the wallpaper of the third dimension and seems to give us a glimpse into the contract between all embodied beings and the clock.
Several paintings share a Homeric ode-like feeling we have come to associate with the heroic voyages of titans before history became supposedly better organized. Perhaps this is fitting, since there is a strong stylistic bond here between those other N.Y. titans who first put abstract painting on the global map. Indeed, Jason’s fifty heroes could just as easily be our own crew of modern painting heroes championed by captains such as Greenberg and Rosenberg.
“First and Last Judgment”, “Distant Shore” and “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles” all bear the hallmarks of a journey through the mythical waters of modernist painting. “Distant Shore” is clearly a reiteration of the Lamia cluster of multiple meanings, but from the perspective of the figure rather than that of the ground. This intimate relationship is crucial to seeing both these pieces of a piece.
The space within which the constellation of meanings hovers and swells in “The Lamia” has been subsumed by one of the constituent parts in “Distant Shore”, where it has reoriented the ground around itself and given a central stance to one particular meaning. This is temporary, a moment later, perhaps after we look away, the ground will have reasserted itself and divulged its empty centre. These two paintings should always be viewed in proximity: they demonstrate how form and content are no more separate than a myth and its mutation.
Is the space within “Distant Shore” the same space as that within “The Lamia”, and that in “Glacier”, and that in “Argonaut”? Unequivocally yes. Suddenly the story expands to include the teller of the tale, the painter of the picture. In quite recent paintings such as “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles” and “Rhinelander”, this same space, the self-same space, is again touched upon. Not in the manner of re-visiting a site, but rather in that of stops made along the way towards the last painting.
What is the last painting? Perhaps in keeping with modernism’s fetish for finality, the last painting is that grail-like object searched for by anyone serious with a brush, the painting after which it won’t be possible or necessary to make another one. This is the border where Breton’s notion of the lamentable expedient is forgone and forgotten.
Except that it never arrives. There is no last painting, there is only the next painting, and even more important, the one after that. Bachelard wrote about the poetics of space and reverie, and Davidson paints about the poetics of absence and reverie, clearly reflecting it for the duration of the time it takes for a painting to explain life, which of course varies from painting to painting.
In “Argonaut”, the meaning of life is the search for the meaning, and the time it takes, the journey towards a familiar place we visit for the first time, as it also is in “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles” where the pilgrim pauses to aerially contemplate his own passage. Not surprisingly, the road in “One Thousand” is definitely the original jug in “Still Life” from 24 years earlier, but knocked over onto its side, having given up the idea of containing and instead demonstrating the containment of travel.
It makes a better road than a jug anyway, and contains more than any other vessel ever could: the road is a vessel for our journey, for the pilgrim’s passage, for painting’s history. But this road is not a physical path to a material place, it is the road to the last painting, to that most immaterial place of all. Its pursuit requires that an artist be a perpetual slave to risk, in the service of what Davidson calls “the fundamental dialectic of painting.”
That dialectic involves a shared duration between the painter, the painting and the viewer, a shared journey taken through the painting so to speak. “Rhinelander” however, seems far more like an arrival than a journey, and in this painting we see more evidence for the notion that all along in our history we may have been only colonizing the void, putting up fences surrounding nothing.
Both “Rhinelander” and “Telemachus Bridge” share a similar subterranean connection to “Glacier” and “Black Star”: the same space is being traversed, the same territory is undergoing a cartographic process, even though the physical ground of each image is becoming more and more tenuous, less and less substantial. Yet still, a marvelous map results nonetheless, though perhaps it is a metaphysical map? It’s not a map to where, it is a map to what, and perhaps eventually to why.
“Rhinelander” is of course a bit of a visual pun. The viewer imagines some ancient place along the Rhine river in Germany whose source is in the Swiss Alps, with the raw red parallel lines suggesting another road or indeed, a riverbank. However, Rhinelander is the name of a little town in Wisconsin, a fact which suddenly makes the painting even more enigmatic in its depiction of a homeland. Except in this case, it is the homeland of abstract painting which is being both evoked and explored.
“Telemachus Bridge” in fact seems to be an even more penetrating look into the molecular space out of which matter emerges and within which matter and energy are interchangeable and indistinguishable. In each of these paintings, just as it does in an actual galactic black hole phenomenon, gravity seems to pull apart and fling to the edges what nature and the painter try to assemble in the centre. But the age of the centre is over. Today, only the edges are real. But how to traverse the open space between one edge and another? A bridge is required, even if only a bridge of sighs between freedom and incarceration, between long voyage and final arrival.
This painting, which so subtly sums up the transition between boyhood and manhood explored in the Telemachy which chronicles the dilemma of the son of Odysseus, appears to offer us an another aerial view of the breathy territory our gaze touched upon in “Glacier” and “Black Star”, and even perhaps the same zoomed-in foliage strewn along those “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles”, but if so, it is an aerial view at the sub-atomic level, the ethereal level of ghost particles passing through all matter, ourselves included. It is as much a bridge between mind and matter as between the heroic voyage and return of the exile.
This juxtaposition of extraordinary works has a subtle yet forceful impact, and conveys pictorially a feeling for paint as an emotional language that the artist has acquired at a very deep level, and over many years.
Such devotion is essential in order to be prepared when the orbit returns.
And despite the difficulties of day to day devotion to a near existential and arcane craft, Davidson still characterizes it as “embracing the remaining, the vestigal, the pellucid language, carved and painted secrets of some future to come….”
Pellucid is also the perfect word for me to borrow and use to describe how these paintings feel (by which I mean of course, how their aura feels when one is standing in front of them, which is only approximated by reproduction) since that excellent word denotes a great objective in painting: that which admits the transfer of light and is translucent, and that which is transparently clear in style and meaning.
Ironically, a third tier of the word’s meaning involves marginal degeneration, the very pictorial device which recurs repeatedly throughout so many of Davidson’s images, but in particular is active and really goes to town in “Glacier”, “Black Star” “Rhinelander” and “Telemachus Bridge”.

These paintings are transparently clear in style and meaning. They are also about the future. The recent future. The perspectives of the entire series of paintings seem to shift along with the pilgrim: close up, near to, far away from, depending on the time-frame for that particular painting to unfold.
Sometimes we are on the landscape (more of a mindscape really) while other times we are inside of it fighting our way out, while yet other times we are floating high above it, contemplating our own awareness of the space.
A suite of four smaller paintings called “Minnow Net 1-4” (or a four part larger painting, as I personally prefer to imagine it) once it is seamlessly hung horizontally suddenly produces a startling piece with an almost overwhelmingly elegiac quality.
Though many of the larger white pieces also involve a complex erasure system with layers of subsumed spontaneity, and also carry a natural and authentic elegiac charge, this piece is the one that seems to come right out and say I am an elegy.
In a way perhaps even more powerful than carving something visually similar to Motherwell’s famous series, “Minnow Net” is itself a quiet elegy to what I still like to refer to as modern painting. Section two of “Minnow Net” is also one of my favourite moments of viewing experience.

A Rhinelander-like strip cuts through the left side, turning what felt like a passageway, a way across the border, into one of several bits of flayed something. This one suggests The Sirens’ Song, the secret modernist urge to end (ironic considering its allegiance to endless progress) and could be thought of as the elegiac last word on a style of expression, after which, the Sirens whisper, there will be no need of any more paintings. But of course, it is not, and the Sirens always lie in order to seduce new sailors.
“Minnow Net”, whether viewed individually or as a suite, is a conscious pause before the arrival in port of The Argo, safely distant from the cooing Siren’s finality, where so many painters have ended up on the rocks of the great afterward. Bereft of what comes after modernism. Simply more modernism.
This flayed something is history itself, suspended in the net of the modern age, unable to turn back, unable to do anything but continue onward through the entropy of our temporary empire on earth. Or else, it’s a minnow.
Either way, the beauty of their raw charm is palpable: each of the four panels has four flayed somethings, suspended in the midst of an apparent and alluring nothing. But is the erased environment the net in question, or is the net this series of dark shapes hanging in nothingness?
Look closely at the nothingness, however, for the answer. It is no more nothing than the shifting shapes are sometimes something. Perhaps the most unsettling of the sumptuous vistas of Davidson’s recent work, “First and Last Judgment” is also one of the most profoundly human and humanist. Who knows why we immediately suspect, feel, or simply know that once we make the first judgment, the last one is a fait d’accompli?
Everything else perhaps is just caressing the abyss, as these forlorn figures appearing to be doing in this quite scary picture. The familiar suspended shapes, perhaps having paid their dues to the void, are now allowed to assume a rough precursor to humanoid form. As if of their own volition the shapes begin to interact and slowly mutate in grasping motions that convey the desire to coalesce, to have a discernible vessel, to reincarnate into fresh form, to sink into the corporeal again, in short, to live. But for now, no subject and no object.
The unity of awareness and space, that inseparable quality of knowledge and absence, is what certain existential comedians refer to as dzogchen, the great perfection. Things being perfect just as they are. When we’re not looking directly at them. And although this notion is never explicitly displayed in the paintings, the state of mind which best appreciates them is definitely one which no longer differentiates between subject and object.
The absence of a figure ground relationship is also one of the key features to another painting about the voyage outward/inward. “Here, Not Lost” is a painted way of saying “waving, not drowning”. The twin-sister of “Zen Crusher”, it likewise is comprised of the reclamation of space from things. Foreground and background are the same ground, objects around us and we ourselves are the same thing, viewed of course, from the vantage point of the voyage.
In a recent work such as “Central Supernatural”, a close cousin to the lamia constellation and one containing that same obscure source of light emanating from its core, we are in the company of a visual drama evoking the ultimate in peripheral vision. Pushed and pulled gently to and fro, our retina eventually surrenders to a still-point, a place where fragmentation is overcome. Perhaps this is what makes Davidson a peripheral visionary?
That, after all is also the aim of all abstract art: the absence of fragmentation. Ironic perhaps, since so much about modernism seems to be inherently about fragmentation, but that is precisely the point, because the best way to produce an elegy to great painting is by producing another great painting. One that unifies thought and touch in order avoid the fragmentation that results from bad timing, which is the cause, according to Bachelard, of all our troubles.
Michael Davidson’s story, or his visual narrative to be more precise, is thus true to two kinds of experience: his own perceptual aspect, a lyrical glimpse into space and time without limits, and the conceptual aspect, the history of modernist painting, a spirit hovering over its fortunate inheritors.
As a result, his painting practice operates in two valuable continuums: his own steadfast and stubborn commitment to paint as a language and abstraction as its advanced dialect, and the continuum of post-war New York action, a subterranean world which continues to evolve, albeit more quietly, today. But in true classical abstract form, Davidson continues to colonize the void with the emotive gesture, to treat space as thought, and thought as expression.
Like all the most arresting abstractions, those of Michael Davidson denote a state of mind by transcribing it, rather than by describing it, they don’t connote. As a consequence, his anti-images offer us the total aggregate of the things to which the word abstract is applicable: he invites us into the very forest of things, ourselves among them. Most importantly perhaps, he also reminds us that white is indeed a colour, it is not the absence of a colour-tone but is the ultimate expression of all tones at once.


In his paintings we are lost in the forest of feelings, with only the painting itself to help guide us in, out and through, since the pictures in the paintings and ourselves both share an identical thingness. Often, the only twilight which guides us forward is the dim necro-glow emanating from the empty centre of several pieces, almost as if what used to be a celestial body used for navigation has long since morphed into a shimmering visual echo.
And both of us, the paintings themselves and their viewers, are in a constant state of flux, which is the other significant temporal reality constantly being explored in the works. Flux is everything. Flux is forbidding only until we accept it as the central reality of our lives, the central supernatural so to speak.
Michael Davidson is painting in the shadow of the history of painting and he is making work which yields images of where modernism might have gone, if it had been allowed to continue on its trajectory. By so doing, he is also offering a renewed and highly pertinent fragment of pure abstract meaning for a new and dangerously fragmented time, simply by so diligently following that trajectory.



The historical traces of that trajectory reveal a mythical voyage almost as lofty as the odes of epic poetry used to convey the mythological cycle upon which so many of this artist’s paintings are loosely based and which they evoke so boldly. By turning the voyage inward, Davidson has touched upon a form of perpetual travel which contains its destination in every brushstroke.
In every emotionally charged brushstroke, Michael Davidson pens a fresh love letter to the interior paramour. To focus our attention in the most intense way possible, in a way that allows a unique rendezvous to take place. Perhaps that is essentially what Rimbaud meant by the more narrow the ray of focus, the more vigilant the light.
That kind of light, the kind of unique glow that seeps out of Michael Davidson’s works, shines into the darkness of only one place. These paintings are postcards from a place that the great American modernist poet Wallace Stevens wrote about in Harmonium, in 1923:
“Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind.”


by-line
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based critic and curator, his recent book
“Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter” was published by
Praeger Press, Connecticut, in 2008. His upcoming book on Modernism, “Dynasty of Dissonance: The Demise of Beauty in the 20th Century” will be released in 2011. He is currently curating an exhibition called “Fugitive: Painting in the 2lrst Century”