Painting in Space and Time

“I am outside history. I wish I had some peanuts. It looks hungry there in its cage.”

                                                                                    --Ishmael Reed
 

            James Nares’ work is so strong and affecting that it would be possible and perhaps even appropriate to discuss it without reference to the current climate in the arts. Nares is a particularly independent artist, and his work has little relation to that of his contemporaries, and his milieu does not appear to be a source of inspiration, a stylistic influence or even a footnote to his work. I have always admired him for coming out of left field, being so ab ovo and apart, for making work that is totally independent of whatever movement critics are conjuring at the moment, whatever attitude is being championed. And yet not being the least bit alienated.

Nares is a painter. A rare thing, considered obsolete by some, retro by others.  But Nares exists outside of the modernist “now” (and the post-modernist, and post-post-modernist now,) outside and untouched by that theoretical moment that is by definition a progression from “then.” His work stands beyond notions (or demons) of progress. He is independent of that system, untouched by fashion or notions of cultural evolution. The work is action, not reaction. He is free.

            This was brought home to me not long ago when I walked through “The Armory Show” a large art fair located on the Hudson River Piers that serve the cruise ships and are often the scene of antique fairs and other gatherings of precious merchandise.  Walking through the booths of galleries from around the world is one of the best ways to become instantly current with the direction of the art world.  This big trade show is ironically named for the first International Exhibition of Modern Art, held in 1913 by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors at the 69^th Infantry Regiment Armory ( Lexington Avenue and 25^th Street .)  The irony is no doubt lost on the organizers of the new armory, but is apparent to anyone armed with a knowledge of the original Armory Show where the public first encountered dada and cubism, where Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” provoked outrage that echoes today. 

            The poet Max Blagg and I wandered the aisles hoping outrage and epiphany. We found lots of irony instead. The art world is in a most ironical mood, it seems.  We discovered little but gestural humor at high prices. Tongues were impacted in cheek. Starved for the shock of the new, we were offered instead the persistence of the same old same old. The principal trends I noticed were small bronze possibly feminist animals and the apotheosis of Andreas Gursky et. al. and the big, busy, mindblowing “Oh wow” photographs that transmute the utterly mundane into bigger than life vision. I realized, a bit glumly, that the world has utterly lost the importance of being earnest.

            How does this all relate to Nares? Well as Blagg and I walked down the hall one of James Nares’ brushstrokes spoke to us softly yet powerfully from quite a distance. We were drawn toward it and as we got closer it seemed to say, don’t worry, art lives. Above all it was beautiful and we didn’t have to say anything about it to make it so.  The picture did all the talking.

            Nares work is outside the mainstream, or would be if there were one. His work isn’t funny or jokey or ironic.  It is what it is: pure painting.  It is painting as a means of expression and exploration.  It is painting about feeling. It is feeling distilled.

            Joan Mitchell said to John Ashbery: “There’ll always be painters around. It’ll take more than Pop or Op to discourage them—they’ve never been encouraged anyway. So we’re back where we started from. There have always been very few people who really like painting—like poetry.  I don’t think you can stop visual painters and all the rest is an intellectual problem.”

            James Nares is a renaissance man in what Mallarmé might have called “an age that has outlived beauty.” Before that he was a renaissance punk. What I mean by that is that he was one of the central art practitioners of that giddy, reckless moment in the late seventies and early eighties when it seemed like something important was happening.  There was an outbreak of energy and creativity that is still felt today, despite its marginalization by the marshaled forces of the market. Nares was a painter then, and his work today continues the early concerns and ground rules of that work. He was also a filmmaker and a musician.  Today he is a secret guitarist, but music is still important to him. It fills his studio, and the way he paints is deeply related to the way a musician works. 

            For a musician, beauty is an assumption. Even when dissonance is seemingly dominant, it is only to evoke beauty through contrast. In true music beauty is always the aim and the key.  The work is the process of conjuring that state from within and manifesting it in the human realm.  Music is the most abstract of the arts. It works, like God, in mysterious ways.  Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk was once asked if that group’s music was experimental and he replied: “All music is experimental.”  Of course some music is more experimental, or at least more consciously, bravely and skillfully experimental, and jazz of the twentieth century remains the high water mark of that noblest experiment.

The great pianist Bill Evans wrote in “Improvisation in Jazz”: “There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

“The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

“This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.”

            The art Nares practices is very much akin to the art of musical improvisation as described by master musician Evans. It is an art that is perfectly trained, disciplined and rigorous in its persistent improvisation.  Nares’ strokes are not the product of deliberation but of direct communication between the eye and hand through a mind that has prepared itself elaborately for direct action, for a kind of inspired, guided automatism. 

            The essentials of Nares’ work have remained the same, while over the years he has worked hard to perfect the means to facilitate the perfect stroke.  I remember visiting his studio in a barn in a Bridgehampton cornfield more than ten years ago, witnessing his first attempts to suspend himself over the canvas in order to obtain the reach and movement he required.  Today he has refined his apparatus, constructing a machine that allows him, with a stunt man’s harness, to position himself optimally in relation to the canvas.  Recent tinkering and tuning have added a rotary component that allows the sort of tight swirl he has sought for years. He has continually refined his brushes, making them himself and working with (and sometimes pleading with) manufacturers to create the correct tools for that freedom of hand.  And yet the act, the actual act, remains the same.

            This spontaneous practice has predecessors in the painters known as abstract expressionists, or what Harold Rosenberg called action painters - the most exemplary of them being Jackson Pollock.   Pollock told Frank O’Hara: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted period’ that I see what I have been about. I have no fears of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of it’s own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, and easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

            Being in the painting is the key, the way the musician is in the music.  As popular music has become more and more a matter of rote and superficial fashion, recycled shards of melody salvaged from an era when music represented feeling, the deep, virtually extinct music of musicians like Bill Evans, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk seems even more precious and magical. And in painting and the visual arts a similar erosion of beauty and craft has occurred, and a market driven dismissal of tradition has resulted in a facile, fashion-driven practice of art, leaving the few practitioners of the difficult and the sublime marooned in spectacular exile and specious insularity.

            The painter Brion Gysin said “And so the whole point of it…is the idea that you just put the material into a certain situation and give it a push, and then the thing makes itself.”

            The stroke has a life of its own.  Nares says: “It’s a fine balance between design and the thing making itself happen.  The stroke has to have complete precision to work. Sometimes I lose it on the exit. You can’t fudge it. It ruins the whole thing.”

            Each figure is almost always contained within the rectangle.  “It’s less of a window if I keep it within the confines of the canvas, but there’s almost always a drip that’s an umbilical cord.”

            Nares paints in time.  He paints chorus after chorus of strokes and the squeegee removes the imperfect figures. It’s not so much trial and error as trial and truth.  His brushstrokes take but two to five seconds each, but they are repeated over hours and days.  “Occasionally I get one on the first try,” says Nares, but usually achieving the desired result takes considerable repetition.  Producing a major work in a few seconds seems alien to our tradition, where masterpieces are supposed to be labored over, but this,
“It’s like car crash time,” says Nares. “Time is slowed down during that movement.  It’s like music. You don’t watch your fingers or you’ll lose it. I have to detach and not direct it too much, but it happens fast enough that I can totally control it.”

            “Can you touch time?” wrote Clark Coolidge in “Now It’s Jazz.”  He wrote: “Art seems to come best from getting oneself up into a state of great mental alertness compounded of sheer high momentum (no thoughts of falling,) and subconscious ability to keep an amazing number of elements suspended ready at the millisecond to be placed in time. Wow. Anyways, I believe in that great high sustain, pick-up on the fly, ability to shine and wing when in doubt, everything up for grabs, a half-conscious corner-pocket genius that can never be taught to anybody completely or explained even to oneself.”

            The work of James Nares has evolved in one continuous series of strokes for over twenty years.  Nares remains outside of movements, or, perhaps he is a stranded survivor of an ancient movement, action painting, like that Japanese soldier hiding out on a Pacific atoll years after the war has ended, refusing surrender.  Nares is his own movement, a mediator between the visible and the invisible.  His mastery of rhythm, harmony and gesture speak directly to consciousness without the mediation of context.

            The strokes are ideograms or hieroglyphs of a language in formation, an alphabet in progress. It’s like making up Chinese as you go along, scat singing new hieroglyphics.  Each line moves in one direction, like time, across canvas space creating a character.  The characters speak and we don’t understand them yet but we stand by them waiting for a breakthrough.

            In the beginning was the word, according to tradition. Burroughs suggests that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. “My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host, though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down….”

            In the face of the breakdown of all systems, new words are necessary. We don’t have the tools. We must improvise. “Painting is a much more authentic reproduction of reality than a photo,” says Nares. “A photograph has the illusion of being real. It’s a potent deception.  But with painting, it’s like what Frank Stella said: ‘what you see is what you see.’”

            Today Pollock is seen as an end, and that is emphasized by the cult of his end—as if his free style could have only ended with his flying intoxicated through air toward a tree--but what if Pollock was a beginning?  A difficult birth, but a birth.  It is commonplace for the great initiators to be isolated in time before their contribution begins to flower. 

            Jon Hassell, a great musician and improviser, wrote: “We must make vivid again those fading regions of our being which lie ‘beyond description.’ Our rich, ‘4D’ sense-surround is flattened into ‘2D’ word descriptions, which then become the currency of reality transactions. Language colonizes our every moment with descriptions of feelings substituting for the feelings themselves. The tail (of abstraction) wags the dog (of sensation).

            “Beyond description” says it all: beyond the writing, the words, the script.”

            “It depends on what the meaning of is is,” said Bill Clinton, highlighting the tenuous nature of words in a democratic society, a place where the word means what the majority says it does. Obviously language needs reinvention. It needs to learn from the characters that compose it.  As Ezra Pound pointed out, the Chinese word for truth is an ideogram of a man standing by his word.

            Nares’ paintings take us beyond words, before words, to a place where the character emerges.  The character is an abstraction, with the potential for recombinant growth.  These mysterious expressions of a line recall the great graffiti theorist Rammellzee who wrote: “To my knowledge of the symbolic codes of the alphabet’s formation, it is very much incorrect.”

            In the late seventies Rammellzee, the brilliant madcap-scientist theorist of Wild Style graffiti and Iconic Panzerism, saw the formation of the character as a form of armament.  He sought to disprove “the old mother’s tale that words will or can never hurt you.” Words are the ultimate weapons. They are used against us every day. Art is the only means by which they can be redefined or restored.

            In these new paintings, with their brilliantly luminous, solarized forms, we see an energized encounter between biology and symbolism.  We see the word beginning again, searching with tactile intuition for the forms with which it can express the state of the world.

            Look. See.

----o----

Photographs in Time

            Sort of like Edward Muybridge meets John Coplans I said. Actually more like Étienne Jules Marey, said James.  Marey was a physiologist who was interested in studying the motion of humans and animals and who invented one of the first motion picture cameras in order to do so.  In 1882 he took the first motion pictures of a bird in flight, capturing twelve images in the course of one second. 

And then, of course, there were Balla and the Italian Futurists, and heading back to the Armory Show, that nude descending the staircase.

            While single mindedly determined in his painting practice, Nares has never shied away from experiment in photography and film.  Not long ago he suffered an aneurysm. It actually occurred shortly after a near drowning experience in the Atlantic Ocean . This insult to his brain had debilitating consequences, robbing him of his ability to work for a considerable time, and almost robbing him of his life.

            During his recovery, Nares’ doctor advised him to stay at home for a while. Being unable to go to the studio, the artist was eager to find something he could do at home while recovering.  I doubt that the doctor imagined that his patient would be testing his healing cranium with a powerful strobe light and physical movement, but that’s exactly what he did. “I guess I was bid mad at the time,” he chuckles. 

The flicker of a strobe can, of course, trigger seizures.  Tony Conrad’s 1966 thirty minute film “Flicker,” consisted only of black and white frames and it caused some viewers to become ill.  Nares managed to survive his experiment on himself, and in fact seems pretty much back in form, but these extraordinary digital photos of the human body in motion under a strobe light are testimony to the almost desperate measures he took to challenge himself while confined.  He took his digital Coolpix camera, set it on long exposure, and began moving through a strobe and noting the effects he could achieve through physical movement.

            Semi-abstract, the resulting photographs are a dialogue between literal recognition of the body parts and the gestures, and a panoply of visual referents: the Alien, a Nautilus shell, skeletal remains of strange species, the Edgerton water drop explosion, the samurai warrior in bamboo armor, the multi-armed Shiva, destroyer of worlds.  Of course they are all Nares, nude and in motion. 

            Although they are far, far different from the paintings, their field of study is related. They are time machine experiments in deducing the symbolic content of the human time signature and meditations on the symmetry of macrocosm and microcosm.  And they are strange and beautiful. And they are evocative of our innate and ambivalent connections with the things we find strange, miraculous, horrifying and beautiful.