Cecelia Feld: Medium and Metaphor

Most laymen think of a painting as a representation of something in front of you as you work. Or it's something you recall or imagine; that is, painting is thought of as in a one-to-one correlation of a past experience. But it is not this at all. It is not a one-to-one relation. It is a triadic relation-composed of the artist, the subject, and the medium (the medium has a long history of its own, and important contemporary problems that every competent artist knows by heart). The subject does not pre-exist. It emerges out of the interaction of the artist and the medium. That is why, and not only how a picture can be creative, and why its conclusions cannot be predetermined. When you have a predetermined conclusion, you have "academic" art, by definition.

Robert Motherwell 1

The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,

Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks

By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
The statues will have gone back to be things about.

Wallace Stevens 2

I should like to say "What the picture tells me is itself." That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own lines and colours.

Ludwig Wittgenstein 3

Cecelia Feld's prints are references to the artist's visual experience, 4 given emphasis through abstraction and the working processes in which monotype 5 and collagraph 6 are engaged as media. "An artist," as Robert Motherwell once noted, "is someone who has abnormal sensitivity to a medium." 7 'Sensitivity to a medium' is an understanding of the potentiality of the metaphors available within the materials and processes of a medium to embody the structure of experience as articulate form within the work. Sensitivity is attending to. 'Attending to' is the condition of being-in-the-world, the situation of being human in which experience occurs. As R. L. Cooper notes:

Our experience is more emotional than intellectual, more active involvement than passive observance. We are not receptive, passive subjects that mirror external objects; we can perceive only because we are always in the midst of those perceivable events. 8

The occasion of feeling presupposes one's being-in-the-world, being always already within a situation with which one is comported. The artwork is a correlative of the structure of feeling inherent in the situation, in material form. Between the occasion of feeling and the artwork as correlative of its structure is a ðïéåóéò, poiesis, a bringing-to-being of that which does not have being without the action of human agency. But this is not to suggest that the facture of artwork is merely an expression of the occasion of feeling within the situatedness of being-in-the-world regarded as a pregiven. Rather, the facture of the artwork is a bringing-to-be that is a dis-covering. Thus Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

One can invent pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms that have been seen before. This way of painting or speaking second hand is what is generally meant by culture. Cézanne's or Balzac's artist is not satisfied to be a cultured animal but assimilates the culture down to its very foundations and gives it a new structure: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. What he expresses cannot, therefore, be the translation of a clearly defined thought, since such clear thoughts are those which have already be uttered by ourselves or by others. "Conception" cannot precede "execution." There is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression, and only the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said. . . . The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere--not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the already constituted reason in which "cultured men" are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which contains its own origins. 11

The engagement of possibility within the facture of the works is thematized and asserted within the works by the use of multiple plates for the majority of the works; Untitled 758, Untitled 759, Untitled 761 and Untitled 763 are exceptions, consisting in a single square on a vertical rectangular sheet. In this, the process of facture of Feld's work utilizes Leo Steinberg's felicitous notion of the flatbed picture plane: 12 a flat working surface on which diverse elements may be assembled. Not only in the facture of the work, but in one's "psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation" 13 the virtual plane of the image is tilted into the horizontal plane with respect to the vertical posture of the encountering figure, a move Steinberg equates with a shift from nature to culture. The assemblage of elements in these prints usually takes the form of a triptych or diptych, the division of the image into sections juxtaposes distinct fields with each other in simultaneity. Along with the differences within the separate sections of the field, this juxtaposition emphasizes the adjacent edges as the liminal zone between field sections. The field edge boundary is a visual virgule, at once separating and joining. The liminal virgule as the shifter 14 between zones is the trace of this underlying play of differance-what is at once different spatially and what is deferred temporally-in Feld's prints as the disclosing of possibilities at the level of configuration.

This disclosing of possibilities exploits the properties of the medium and a set of procedural processes within which one conducts a series of operations. To describe a medium in such terms may seem inappropriate with respect to artworks. But as Rosalind Krauss has noted:

within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms . . . . 15

Rudolf Arnheim has urged that the artist's enterprise is that of "the slow and patient and disciplined search for the one and only form that fits the underlying experience." 16 In distinction from this claim of singularity of relation between experience and its signification, the multiple iteration of elements in Feld's prints present one with an apparent aporia. Interpretive encounter of multiplicity within these prints, both as individual, autonomous works consisting of multiple elements and as a body of works in which variation of elements occurs from print to print, elicits a viewer response to the formal variation as conducing to approaching "the underlying experience" as an asymptotic limit. Interpretive encounter of multiplicity within these prints, both as individual, autonomous works consisting of multiple elements and as a body of works in which variation of elements occurs from print to print, elicits a viewer response to the formal variation as correlative with however singular "the underlying experience" may have been, like each of Feld's prints consisting of multiple fields, that experience entails multiple aspects which are unfolded through the multiple iteration of elements in the work. In the former case the response is commensurable with a position in which experience and its signification is ultimately determinate and singular. In the latter case the response is commensurable with a position in which experience and its signification is ultimately indeterminate and multiple.

Like the liminal edge between fields in these works, at once a joining of difference and the deferral of separation, the apparently aporetic relation between the seemingly incommensurable viewer responses of singularity and multiplicity is subsumed within the operation of differance. As such, a sublation of incommensurable terms obtains. As Rosalind Krauss noted, commenting on abstraction early in the twentieth century, "To wish to paint the operations of the dialectic is no small ambition." 17

Cecelia Feld's work is in private and major corporate collections including IBM, Dallas; Frito-Lay, Plano; Delta Airlines, Dallas; EDS, Santa Clara, California; GTE, Las Colinas; Sun Oil Exploration and Development Co., Dallas; and Safeco Land Title Co., Dallas. Included in fifty group exhibitions, her recent solo exhibitions include: Singular Impressions, Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1997; Cecelia Feld: Connections, Longview Museum, Longview, Texas, 1989. Cecelia Feld received the Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College, and the Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas. Feld is the recipient of a McDowell Colony Visual Artist Fellowship and a Vermont Studio Center Printmaking Residency/Fellowship. She has lived and worked in Dallas since 1969.

Feld's work can be seen online at http://www.studio7310.com.

1. Robert Motherwell, "A Process of Painting," (lecture for the conference The Creative Use of the Unconscious by the Artist and the Psychotherapist, Eighth Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, New York, 5 October 1963; the lecture was published in 1964 in Annals of Psychotherapy), The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 138ff. Return
2. Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," V.1-9, Poems by Wallace Stevens, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Random House, 1959), p. 148. Return
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, #523, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953, 1968), p. 142e. Return
4. "I gather bits and pieces from my visual experience and bump them up against each other. There are references in my work to the textures, colors, lines and shapes of my encounters in the real world." Cecelia Feld, Artist Statement, 1999. Return
5. Monotype denotes the process of printing a unique work from painting on a matrix. Return
6. Collagraphs are prints made from an inked matrix consisting of glue or acrylic resin, and sometimes various other materials, adhered to a matrix and printed either intaglio (from, as it were, the ink left in the 'valleys') or relief (from ink deposited on the tops of the 'hills'). Return
7. Robert Motherwell, "A Process of Painting," (lecture for the conference The Creative Use of the Unconscious by the Artist and the Psychotherapist, Eighth Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, New York, 5 October 1963; the lecture was published in 1964 in Annals of Psychotherapy), The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 138ff. Return
8. Ron L. Cooper, Heidegger and Whitehead: A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), p. 11. Return
9. This notwithstanding Stephan Strasser's distinction of 'pure' and 'directed' feelings; the former as thymic dispositions, states-of-mind, the latter as intentional felt-response. Strasser further distinguishes among directed feelings as intentional felt-responses, between "unqualified objectivating feeling" and feelings having as their object "merely a total impression." See Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart, trans. Robert E. Wood (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1977), p. 234ff. Note, too, that Strasser urges that consciousness at the level of disposition does not entail an object; his point in regarding the dispositional as prior to a subject-object dichotomy is well taken, but nevertheless his definition of the dispositional as a "feeling for the All" would seem to entail intentionality, even if, as in any proposition having the All as a referent, the term 'the All' is necessarily incompletely filled. [pp. 190-192]. Return
10. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New Work: The Free Press, 1967 [1933]), p. 180. Return
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 18-19. Return
12. Leo Steinberg, "Other Criteria," Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 55-91. Return
13. Steinberg, ibid., p. 84. Return
14. In linguistics, a shifter is a word the signification of which functions by virtue of its own emptiness, e.g., 'this' or 'that' has no reference in itself, but has its reference supplied in the occasion of usage within a speech act: 'This chair is gray, that chair is blue.' See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 115-121, for an extended analysis. Return
15. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), p. 288. Return
16. Rudolf Arnheim, "Form and Content," Toward a Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 13. Initial publication in College Art Association Art Journal (Fall, 1959), pp. 2-9. Return
17. Rosalind Krauss, "Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), p. 237. Return