A . . A 'flrt mf\rnertcaJune 1990 Notes on

LineSweeping, swenting, jittery or curui,ng, line ltas reemerged as anenergeti,c force in recent painti,ng. Below, the author eramines

the dffirent roles that Ptne has come to play i'n the work ofJoan Snyder, Donald Baechler, Jonathan Lasker and Nobu Fukui.

BY CARTER RATCLIFF

f, t a recent show of new paintings by Joan Snyder, a thought|l popped into focus: in recent seasons, painters' line has dis-played more than ordinary energy, I'm not reporting the coalescenceof a trend. Line is particularly forceful these days because it goes ins0 many directions, In the Snyder canvases, it tends to be wide andgooey. Her lines look like variants on the patches of color the artistformerly laid on the canvas in thin, quick washes. Transparency hasdeparted, but the intensity of color remains. It's as if the passage oftime has given those early streaks of pigment a greater density.Thickening for a decade or so, they have grown smaller and crowdedcloser together. Usually horizontal,-these patterns of strokes spreadwith slow insistence, giving a loose, local order to smears and blobsof glossy pigment.

In an oil-on-linen painting just over a foot square, black lineswriggle over yellow ones, filling the surface from side to side. Caughtin this irregular pattern is a flesh-colored X-the figure of a nudewoman with arms and legs extended, 0f course she, too, is made upof a pattern of horizontal lines. One could say, plausibly enough, thatSnyder assembles images from a basic linear element, but that'seven more Terry Winters's style, From a small repertory of schemat-ic forms, he has built a large population of biomorphic images, Hislinear impulse leads him to map a narrow range of formal possibili-ties in exquisite, occasionally glum detail. Snyder follows no precise-ly comparable impulse. Instead of making complex forms fromsimple ones, she lets chaos brew and bubble for a time, thenencourages a line to emerge and stretch itself out. Laid down on alinen or velvet surface with a heavily loaded brush, Snyder's pat-terns have a tendency io become textures. From this texture, faces,bodies and landscapes emerge, but never, one senses, on cue, andsometimes nothing recognizable makes an appearance.

Like Paul Klee, but with none of the earlier artist's perky heroism,Donald Baechler imitates the line of children and other estheticnaifs. Klee modeled himself on the child as a force of unspoilednature. Baechler never summons this figment of the Romantic andearly modern imagination, His model appears to be the all too realphenomenon of the child who feels powerless, bewildered, with-drawn, The Baechlerian rhetoric is rich with devices that signifyindecision-rubbed-out passages, overpainting, collage that lookslike an attempt to deny a mistake. His mock-childish line advancesfearfully, without a hint of innocent confidence. Sometimes the line'strajeciory collapses, giving a face or an arm a deflated look. When a

Art in Amerira 15

Nobu Fukut: Irises, Ig88, oll on canaaa, 72 by 96 inches. Courtesy Martia del Re/Patricia llamilton,

All the delicacY of Fukui'sobservations of naturer all theconfidence that guides hisexecution shows in his l ine.

line goes right, the artist retraces it in desperate celebration, then

retra-ces it again and again, until in the end it begins to look wrong.

In the role o1 the unhappy, untaught artist, Baechler diagrams the

uncertainties besetting sophisticated ones-or some of them, any'way.

By contrast, line is amazingly self-assured in recent paintings byJonathan Lasker and Nobu Fukui. Drawing from the shoulder, Fukuiincises long, arcing lines in wet flelds of monochrome paint, usuallywhite. His imageJof petal, stem and leaf have the immediacy of

recollections sharpened by time. He gets the precise degree of

oointiness in furled lilies, for example, or of twisted curvature ing...n p.pp..s. Minutely accurate, these details are gigantic and so

ioncise t'irat tirey verge on abstraction, Hovering against their wide

backgrounds, the artist's subjects are utterly still. They are emblems

of th"emselves. Their individuality is still powerful, but it no longer

June 1990

belongs to them. It is the property of the line that has transposedthese curving, twisting, involuted objects to the flatness of thecanvas. Frorn a distance, Fukui's line looks absolutely steady' Hisimages seem to have been stamped, as if by an elegant machine, on amon-ochrome field. Up close, one sees signs of the hand, faintdeviations in the line as it swerves or angles or sails over the surface.The precision of Fukui's line is not that of a drafting instrument butof a gesture steadied by the will, Bngaging the entire body, his kindof drlwing transfers to the subject a quality that looks like posture'

The artist's lilies, poinsettias and pomegranates seem to arrangetheir outlines in anticipation of an audience'

Fukui makes his biggest paintings from two or three canvases'The abutment of panels often forms a border between two realms,each with its own pictorial principles. Crossing one of these borders,a motif outlined on a white field becomes a solid white form on avivid orange or red or green background. Sudden but smooth, thepassage from one panel to another is like a shift of light' Onceiransparent and now translucent, form suffers no sharp jolts' Dis'playing its variety, Fukui's universe asserts its unity.^

tn ttre universe proposed by Jonathan Lasker's pictures, varietymakes the opposite point. Here, to jump from one pattprn, from oneplane, to anolher is to find oneself on alien ground, entangled in a

154

Joan Snyder: Lady BlackJines, 1989, oil on linen, 1Zt/t bg lZt/t inches' Courtesy Hirschl & Adler Modern'

new set of premises. Lasker Iikes to induce the pictorial equivalentof culiure shock. His chief device is line smeared on the canvas witha quick, wristy, possibly impatient gesture. Red rushes over pink,pink skids across green and purple and red. Lasker seeks no credit ,for elegant execution. Still, there is something dandifled about thecare he takes to ensure that each impastoed streak is just preciseenough to make its point about pictorial structure. An exuberantlydidactic painter, he encourages us t0 see that, when faced by animage, our first impulse is to look for spatial cues, Nearly always, wefind them. If not, we impose them,

Lasker makes his figure/ground relationships rackety andtenuous or, just as often, screamingly obvious. Fully intended' hisawkwardness is the vehicle of his flnesse. Never does he let usassimilate a spatial device quietly, unconsciously. With brash lineand nervy color clashes, he prompts us to see that our seeing is not apassive, merely physiological process, It is an active grappling withour culture's visual conventions. As his grand and jittery spatialeffects jolt the act of looking into a state of self-consciousness, the'60s-decorator look of his surfaces jostles the historical sense awake,If Lasker's nostalgia for low-art interiors and high-modernist esthet-ics drives his art right up to the moment, what sort of moment arewe drifting through?

fl one of these painters-and this remark applies as well tol! Baechler and Winters-uses the impersonal line that has had alook of quasi-official propriety since Minimalism's mid-'60s ascen'dance. Before the '60s decade was over, artists like Frank Stella andDonald Judd had established a principle: when looking at form, oneshould see only form. I believe that, in responsqto an art-world poll'most critics and artists (let's say 84 percent, with a 6-point marginfor error) would say, yes, it is sometimes important to see form asnothing other than form, Yet I think that it is impossible to see formthat way, and I find little evidence that anyone really does'

Reviewing John Marin's watercolors in the Nuw York Times,Michael Brenson wrote of Iines that "lift" other forms, giving theeffect "of a city that has just begun to be built," A few months ago inthis magazine, a minutely particular account of Jaan Poldaas'sbrushwork led Walter Thompson to the conclusion that the artist'swork has "agay,evenjaunty feeling," I gather from my reading thatformal description, these days, is nearly always like this' It attri-butes emotions to formal traits. It pictures those traits as gesturing,acting, conveying attitudes, Louise Fishman, wrote Holland Cotter(again in these pages), Iays down paint in "gravely commandingsweeps,"

By banning metaphor and discouraging empathetic impulses and

Arl in America 155

projection, '60s artists imposed an altonishing degree of neatness0n art, That is not what we want today, or s0 our empatheticreadings of abstract art suggest, Nor, despite the recent flurry ofMinimalist roundups in New York galleries, have straight-ruled linesregained their old clout, They ofrer just one formal option amongmany. We pay as much attention to Cy Twombly's scrawls, theirregularities of Jasper Johns's hatchmark and the Johnsian waythat line branches over Brice Marden's recent canvases, Yet I sensethat the contemporary art world is subliminally jealous of theMinimalists' absolutism and the equally clear and rigid theoremsonce wielded by Greenbergian critics. Those artists and writersassumed very convincing postures of self-confldence.

That's out of the question now, though there are ways to avoid animpression of utter self-doubt. One can strengthen the tone ofcritical certitude by reading into art only the most generic feelings.The trouble is that j.oy, gloom and calm are never as impersonal asmuch recent commentary makes them seem' I think we need toacknowledge that only particular emotions can charge particularforms. This acknowledgment brings criticism to the brink ofdescribing the character, the singular self, who must have felt thenongeneric emotions that a particular painting conveys. A work ofart never merely expresses a personality, so I don't mean that weshould try to read back from an image to the person who made it'The critic's concern is with the flctive self that every art workimplies. In the formal qualities of an art work lurks an artist'sproposal about the way to be, personally. For example, the make'believe childishness of Baechler's paintings suggests that we have,at present, no better option than to cultivate an ironic and miserableprimitivism.

ft escended from Romantic theory, possibly from Rousseau's edu-l/ sntionnl programs, Paul Klee's ideal of the innocently creativechild was well-worn before he got his hands on it. By then, AlfredJarry and the Dadaists had proposed the not-so-innocent child, themadman, the delinquent and other difficult types as the prototype ofthe artist, Elaborated by the Surrealists and later by Jean Dubuffet,these proposals returned to the image of the crbative artist some ofthe glamour, the aura of danger, that it had lost to the forces ofrespectability. There was to be no comfort in the artist's resem-blance to a child, for childhood, Iike madness, was proclaimed asubversive state. Even the most cynical, bad-boy Dadaists covertlyhoped that if their childish cynicism were sufficiently offensive,

Donold BaecNer: Untltled (Horse), 1989' ocryllc and collage onJute'

40 bg 58 inchee. Photos this tpreod courtesq Tong Shqfrazl Gallery.

modern life's most stultifying assumptions would be shaken. Ordilnary people might wake up a bit. There is no sign of that lingering,innocent hope in Baechler's image of the child-creator. His line iswobbly and obsessive. Sometimes it tries to burrow into the surfaceand hide. 0ccasionally it makes a self-mocking show of bravura.Mostly it is just sullen. For Baechler, art history and art'worldinstitutions and modern traditions play the part of oppressive grown.ups, In the character of the dreadfully alert child those grown'upshave defeated, he scratches grafrti on the imaginary walls of anexistence understood as a prison.

Joan Snyder's art looks and feels nothing like Baechler's, yet thetwo artists are similar in several ways. Neither gives any sign offaith in esthetic progress, and neither responds to this loss of faithwith art works analyzing the present state of the culture' Yet Sny-der's paintings propose a way of being that has no echo in Baechler'sart. He enacts a state of deprivation in a stalled world. She-or thecharacter that her art presents to us-is manic in a universe with nogrand openings t0 the future, only the prospect of time's ordinarypassage, a slow, onward, cumulative drift that brings much of thepast with it as it advances.

The dense, sometimes clogged look of Snyder's recent paintingssuggests a present that will remain overcrowded no matter howwidely it sprawls. Naturally, emotions run together here, and herimage of a painfully grimacing head has more than a family resem'blance to ecstatic suns and pensive moons, These round images looklike the same one caught up in the difrering moods that prevail inthe far-flung regions of Snyder's elastic present. Only because hercommand of painterly mess is flrm can her image ooze so vigorouslyand still be intelligible. With surprising speed, one learns to distin-guish a Iine from a smear or a blot. Sometimes she enforces claritywith lines made of thin wooden strips, painted and then wired to thesurface, More often she lets line swim on the strong, ruminativecurrents 0f the imagel sometimes Snyder's line itself becomes thecurrent, but only for a time. Then it sinks back into the eddying swirlof an oeuvre that proposes the self as natural, now ebbing, nowflgwing, yet always powerful enough tn absorb the world into theflux of its private interests.

I onathan Lasker's work presents him as a public flgure grapplinglf with painting's permanent state of crisis. Never does he find thepresent hopeless. There is always a pictorial point to clarify, anargument to restate. Line is his most versatile device, the one thatstands up best to conflicting demands. Because he is an analyticpainter, he needs line for the same reason that Euclid needed ih tomake diagrams. Yet Lasker is an intuitive painter as well, so dia-grammatic results never satisfy him, He makes up his piptorialanalyses as he goes, following the argument where his expeff$c$ ofan unfolding image leads him. So he needs an idiosyncratic llff* iiftdhe gets it with a pushing, shoving brushstroke that leaves the ftfilgejumpy and demonstrative, full of cues for the eye alert to thesubtleties of Lasker's arguments about pictorial form and the way itinhabits space.

His pictures make a spectacle of their workings. When the play offlgure and ground, surface and depth, is especially animated, itseems that Lasker stands beside his work in the guise of thetechnician who presses the button that sets in motion a series ofpictorial revelations. 0r one could see his painted conflgurations asimages of himself, in pictorial space, gesticulating, doing whateverthey can to render the eye conscious of what it does as it makessense of a picture.

Guided by the artist's statements, one senses that the Laskerianfigure in all its incarnations is urging our awareness of pictorialmatters to leap beyond the borders of art. So, for example, an

156 June 1990

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Baec$en Bafzac (After Rodtn) /989, acrylic, oll and collage on llnen, 111 inchec equare.

understanding 0f flgure-ground relations refines one's sense of beingan individual against the backdrop of the environment. ThoughLasker doesn't think that painting can engage ecological issuesdirectly, he suggested in a recently published conversation withTricia Collins and Richard Milazzo that art can address such issuesas "the conflict between culture and nature,0r.,.. technology andnature." Art "can help find the way to structuring a [method oflreasoning that can then deal efrectively with . . , crises as theyarise." In the struggle with pictorial form, one develops intellectualmuscles useful in the world at large,

If Lasker's Iine points beyond the picture, Nobu Fukui's linegathers attention to itself. Fukui does this with such grace that onehardly realizes what has happened. Vision was occupied with theartist's motifs-leaves flattened against the canvas, a stem curvinginto depth-and now it focuses on the groove he has sent throughwet paint with a metal instrument. One could say that the subjecthas vanished, become abstract, yei it stays in the forefront ofattention even when one moves too close to the canvas to see theimage in full. 0f course, concentration on Fukui's line changes thenature of his motif. At first it looked like a picture. From up close,one sees the motif less as a representation and more as the occasionfor an act, the one that left this trace on the surface.

Fukui's lines seem to have appeared slowly, though there is noway of knowing if they did. The point is that they guide the eye alongthem with deliberation. Faint waverings in immense curves signalthe artist's reliance on his hand-or, as I suggested earlier, on hand,arm and shoulder, For line to be as Iithe as Fukui's, and as consistentin pressure, requires sharply focused physical energy, which in turnrequires a great intensity of will. Not that his is an art of flexedmuscles. 0n the contrary, it is thoroughly at ease. Nonetheless, allthe delicacy of Fukui's observations of natural things, all the flnessehe deploys in turning things into images, all the confidence thatguides his execution of an image shows in his line, where it reads asevidence of an unwavering will. No artist lacks will, but few havemanaged, as Fukui has done, to make it a salient quality of asophisticated artistic persona. The painter implied by his paintings isa figure completely certain about what is to be done and preciselyhow to do it. This is an astonishing persona to flnd amid all theothers-frantic, detached or dispirited-that crowd the art'worldmoment.

Authon Carter Rolclif is writing o.book on posluar Arnerican painting

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Art in America