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?