If writing stands to painting at the right angle of horizontal to vertical, it does so, as has been remarked, through an opposition of culture to nature, its horizontality removing it from the "natural" upright field of vision to the more culturally processed domain of the written sign. But that there is an axis along which these two planes can always be folded onto one another is a function of what Foucault would call the "commonplace" of representation.
Rosalind E. Krauss 1
The poetics of the open work is an expression of such a historical possibility: here is a culture that, confronting the universe of perceivable forms and interpretive operations, allows for the complementarily of different studies and different solutions; here is a culture that upholds the value of discontinuity against that of a more conventional continuity; here is a culture that allows for different methods of research not because they may come up with identical results but because they contradict and complement each other in a dialectic opposition that will generate new perspectives and a greater quantity of information.
Umberto Eco 2
Experience in contemporary postindustrial society is mediated by a plethora of images and texts. Within this field, Larry Graeber's works are positioned at the intersection of multiple domains of practice and discourse. In this positioning, Graeber's works are a return ab origine behind and beyond modernism, a refounding cloaked in the repetitions of appropriation. Graeber has commented on his work:
In a world of increased stimuli and pictorial resources, I find appropriation fitting for the source of my gaze. As the model or still life informed previous painters, my appropriated images inform and help shape the content of my paintings. What I have found is that every image gathered from appropriated sources is a sign of a special interest. So a lot of the images I choose are direct references to language codes. In using these language codes in conjunction with the figure, a better understanding of the rationale of the world as a coded construct emerges. 3
Insofar as consciousness is always filled, is always consciousness of, one is always already within a world. For the artist, that world of coded constructs includes a tradition of antecedent and contemporary artworks, practices, and discourses. One's world, insofar as it is world as distinguished from earth,4 is articulated, mediated, constructed through systems of signs. Each system of signs constitutes a framework for understanding one's being-in-a-world. From within an engagement with a particular framework, the system of signs itself becomes transparent, invisible. Cultura secunda natura fit: "Culture becomes like second nature." Regarded as reflexive, artworks make visible the means of their signification. Graeber's works are notable for the juxtaposition of visual and linguistic sign systems in the loci of the several artworks. It is notable that this is notable. The juxtaposition of image and textis a venerable practice: graphikos, the classical Greek word for painting, also has the sense of writing. 5 The modernist turn adumbrated in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon and famously reiterated in high modernism in Clement Greenberg's seminal "Toward a Newer Laokoon" repudiates the ancient "sister arts" tradition for a reductivist purism. 6 While the reductivist, purist move in its Greenbergian formulation is in the service of separating the visual and the literary, this in turn underwrites a separation of high and low, fine art and kitsch.7 The shift to an inclusive regard of the literary in the form of text, and of mass cultural and graphical sign systems and referents, constitutes one fundamentum divisionis of the modern and the postmodern. This shift in practice is mirrored in the regard recently given to noncanonical images within the discourse of art history. 8 Graeber's works engage the abstract turn in twentieth century painting even as his interposition of textual elements obviates the traditional presupposition of purism on which the abstract turn rests. Graeber's combination of linguistic signs with visual signs is twofold: those which are extrinsic to the visual field of the artwork, being the titles given the works by the artist but not entailing the presence of a linguistic signifier within the visual field of the work itself, and those which entail a linguistic signifier present in the visual field of the work itself, this signifier frequently but not always being the title of the work. Even in those instances where the title is associated with but not present as a signifier within the visual field of the artwork, the title qua supplement is a parergon, 9 that which is around the work (the ergon) but not incorporated within the work. As such, the title is a synecdoche of the discursive field in which the artwork is embedded, though the title, unlike the preponderance of that field, is (at least in the cases concerning us here) instantiated by the artist. Like the parergon constituted by the artwork's title, the plywood frame surrounds the work, synecdochaic for the discursive field in which the artwork is embedded but as a palpably physical entity. The mat-like character of the plywood frame, qua frame, enables a tension between the objectness of the artwork and the 'window' opened by the surrounding frame, while qua plywood a transitional space is introduced which interjects the quotidian between artwork and the white wall of the gallery as framing context. 10 The framework of the title of the artwork is the linguistic passe-partout, the master-key of the pass-through of the discursive frame. Jerrold Levinson proposes a theory of titles entailing the following theses:
Levinson's four theses are useful but in themselves insufficient. Granted that titles are integral parts and essential properties of the artwork always entailing aesthetic potential, the interesting questions include the function of the title with respect to its aesthetic potential, and what the role of the title is in the understanding and interpretation of the artwork. The title mediates understanding and interpretation of the artwork by both delimiting the range of interpretations available and as a prompt toward one or more specific fields of interpretation. Regarded in its negative aspect, the title excludes some interpretations, rendering them implausible by imposing a supplemental signified conjoined with the visual domain of the artwork. Regarded in its positive aspect, the title supplements the signified of the visual domain of the artwork. The dual movement of restriction and expansion of signification is an operation of difference, a dehiscence opening domains of interpretive discourses.
While the interaction of visual and linguistic signs might be most obviously addressed in reference to his artist's books Fish and Kill, and the works on paper, these matters may be engaged in reference to all of Graeber's works in this exhibition. I shall refer to the paintings, not to perpetuate a fallacious supposition of a hierarchy of media, but rather because of the greater accessibility of the paintings; the codex form of the books allows only one spread visible at a time. The concentration of linguistic and visual codes in the paintings allow an explicit address of their interaction in these works.
Numbers presents the title as included text, written across the upper section of the work in white chalk-like oil stick, and as an alternative signifier with the sign # within a circle in the lower section of the work. Together, Numbers and # evoke the absent set of numbers as potential presence. Between the linguistic signifiers Numbers and #, the black field of paint references the surface of blackboards, and alludes to the surface of blackboards in Cy Twombley's 'blackboard paintings', though Graeber's application of oil paint is much thicker than the application of distemper in Twombley's works. 12
911 has its title literally integral to the work, incorporated into the painterly surface as a sgraffito element. In this and other works where text is created by marking into the supervening layer wet paint to expose underlying surfaces, the mark is positioned between drawing and writing, at the intersection of the axes of the visual and painterly and the linguistic and literary.
Orange Grill establishes a pattern with sgraffito lines through a orange and white field of thick, dragged paint. The Grill of Orange Grill elicits attention for these lines, reversing figure and ground, with the absenting of paint in the facture of the scraffito lines enabling the not-paint as presence. The four over two grid is implicitly extended onto the mat-like plywood frame with black lines, while the orange is continued in curvilinear lines on the plywood. The four center sections of the grid are of equal size, while those to the left are somewhat smaller, and those to the right are still more narrow, disrupting the anticipated regularity of the structure. This asymmetrical distribution of gridded areas implies the continuation of the more narrow areas at the left and right edges behind the 'window' opened by the plywood frame. While the surface of the canvas is nearly in a plane with that of the surrounding plywood, and the sgraffito grid exposes the canvas beneath the surface of the paint, the effect is the visual recession of the orange field. The painted canvas is at once an object, and a virtual space seen through a window.
The title Black Diamonds denotes the patterned surface of the artwork which is its ostensible referent, while connoting the associations "black diamonds" evoke. The title also denotes the diamond- or lozenge-shaped black forms of the surface of the work, formed by the sgraffito linear marks through the black paint to uncover the white priming on the canvas and an area of yellow underpainting. Like the grid in Orange Grill, the relative uniformity and modular character of the pattern created by the linear structuring of the surface has the effect of giving emphasis to the planarity of the surface.
E Tree Sign is a triptych of oil on canvas paintings within mat-like plywood frames, each utilizing different semiotic codes. The left painting presents an illustration of the execution of the letter E with semaphore flags by a boy in a ocherous uniform, visual signifier qua image representing a conventional code for a linguistic signified. The style of the illustration, and of the uniform--and indeed the use of semaphore code--give a sense of temporal distance. The image of the boy overlies a white field broken by vertical blue lines, the linearity flattening the field by obviating reading the ground as an indefinite extension of space. The center painting presents a seemingly naive painting of a tree in orange with a simply drawn house form to the left, on a white field with horizontal red lines on which are overlying stokes of blue. The visual signifiers qua images denote as referents absent objects and their absent linguistic signifiers. The right painting presents a fleur d'lis, a codified iconic sign, over a white field with horizontal blue lines.
Toll Free: 1 - 800, Toll Free: You, and Toll Free: Field of Dreams comprise a triptych. The color sequence of these three pieces suggest an allusion to Barnett Newman's series of paintings entitled Who's Afraid of Red Yellow Blue. 13 Their configuration as a triptych distends the unity inherent in Newman's paintings into a unified but segmented form. Toll Free: 1 - 800 has a yellow field with sgraffito lines just below the top edge and just above the bottom edge, with the lines parallel to the edges. In the center of the field, 1 - 800 is included as a sgraffito element. In Toll Free: You, the scraffito lines run vertically parallel to the left and right edges. Between them, YOU in blocklettered all majuscule is included as a sgraffito text. Like the 'zips' in Barnett Newman's paintings, these lines in Toll Free: 1 - 800 and Toll Free: You defocalize the gaze; in Newman's paintings from the central color field, here from the central sgraffito text. 14 InToll Free: Field of Dreams, the vertical and horizontal sgraffito lines of Toll Free: 1 - 800 and Toll Free: You are combined, but rendered vestigial, palimpsest-like by dragging the field of ultramarine blue back across them. The sgraffito lines in Toll Free: Field of Dreams enclose a central rectangle, doubling by the scraffito lines the field of the canvas. The text The Field of Dreams, all in cursive minuscule except for the D of dreams delimits the interpretive range by denoting the canvas surface as a field of dreams. In the procession of configuration of sgraffito lines from Toll Free: 1 - 800 to Toll Free: You to Toll Free: Field of Dreams, the move from horizontal quiescence, to vertical activity, 15 to a combination of horizontal and vertical is a visual metaphor for Hegelian aufhebung: the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of sublation.
Otherwise put, Graeber repeatedly presents a pattern or schemata as an instantiation of regularity, subsequently disrupted and violated as an instantiation of irregularity. Together, regularity and irregularity, continuity and discontinuity, present the disruption of pattern as itself a pattern. As Umberto Eco urges:
...we may well wonder whether contemporary art, by accustoming us to continual violations of patterns and schemes--indeed, alleging as a pattern and scheme the very perishability of all patterns and schemes, and the need to change them not only from one work to the next but within the same work--isn't in fact fulfilling a precise pedagogical function, a liberating role. If this were the case, then its discourse would go well beyond questions of taste and aesthetic structures to inscribe itself into a much larger context: it would come to represent modern man's path to salvation, toward the reconquest of his lost autonomy at the level of both perception and intelligence.16These works entail a putting into question of the modalities and means of representation: of tangible concrete entities, of abstract concepts, of representation itself. This putting into question renders the commonplaces and common source of the visual and the linguistic sign visible as such. To make representation visible is to make our "ways of worldmaking" 17 visible. To make the means of our meanings visible is to thematize them, and so to make them to hand: tools. All that we perceive is within the flux of our own creation, the worlds we make. And this leaves us with the question of how the flux is to be shaped, of what world we elect to make, now (as we always are), between retention and protention. 18
Works in the Exhibition
- Orange Grill
- oil on canvas, wood 29 x 24"
- 911
- oil on canvas, wood 29 x 24"
- Black Diamonds
- oil on canvas, wood 26.5 x 21.5"
- Numbers
- oil on canvas, wood 26.5 x 21.5"
- Free Me: Inferno I
- mixed media on paper 12.5 x 11.5"
- Free Me: Inferno II
- mixed media on paper12.5 x 11.5"
- Free Me: Free Me
- mixed media on paper12.5 x 11.5"
- Free Me: Friends
- mixed media on paper 12.5 x 11.5"
- E Tree Sign: E
- oil on canvas, wood 27 x 23"
- E Tree Sign: Tree
- oil on canvas, wood 27 x 23"
- E Tree Sign: Sign
- oil on canvas, wood 27 x 23"
- Toll Free: 1-800
- oil on canvas, wood 21.5 x 26.5"
- Toll Free: You
- oil on canvas, wood21.5 x 26.5"
- Toll Free: Field of Dreams
- oil on canvas, wood 21.5 x 26.5"
- Kill
- mixed media on paper 8.5 x 8"
- Fish
- mixed media on paper8 x 8.5"
Larry Graeber's work appears in this exhibition through the courtesy of Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas, Texas.
Endnotes
1 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993), p. 284. Return
2 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 83. Return
3 Larry Graeber, in ed. Jim Edwards, Texas Biennial Exhibition: Eighty Texas Artists (Dallas: Dallas Artists Research and Exhibition, 1993), p. 52. Return
4 Heidegger distinguishes 'earth' from 'world': That into which the earth sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we call the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is effortless an untiring, . . . In sitting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. . . . The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there." Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadler (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 46. Cf. R. Raj Singh, "Heidegger and the World in an Artwork," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48:3 (Summer 1990), pp. 215-22. Return
5 Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon [abridged] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1871), s.v. graphikos. Cf. Demosthenes Davvetas, "Cy Twobley's 'Zographike', ed. Harald Szeemann, Cy Twombly: Paintings, Works on Paper, Sculpture (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1987), pp. 22-24. Return
6 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laoko”n: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laokoon," in ed. John O'Brien, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1986), v.1. [Initial publication in Partisan Review (July-August 1940)]. The "sister arts" tradition has its classical enunciation in Horace's ut pictura poesis, De Arte Poetica, line 361. For seminal recent works on the relation of images and texts, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) along with his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and her Image and Code (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). Return
7 Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). [Initial publication in Partisan Review, 1939.] Return
8 Inter alia, James Elkins, "Art History and Images That Are Not Art," Art Bulletin LXXVII:4 (December 1995), pp. 553-571. Return
9 'Parergon' has its etymology from para + ergon, "beside the main subject, subordinate, incidentally." Liddell and Scott, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 531. For its use in aesthetics, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment 14, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 72; Jacques Derrida, "Parergon," The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) pp. 15-147. Return
10 See Jacques Derrida, "Passe-Partout," in Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 1-13. Return
11 Jerrold Levinson, "Titles," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44:1 (1985), p. 33. Author's emphasis. Return
12 E.g., Night Watch, 1966, distemper and crayon on canvas, 190 x 200 cm; and the several Untitled works from the series of 1968 - 1970. Return
13 The allusion involving reference to these works is neither direct nor simple, but see Who's Afraid of Red Yellow Blue I, 1966, oil on canvas, 75 x 48", collection of Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse, New York, New York; also Who's Afraid of Red Yellow Blue II, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 102", collection of Annalee Newman, New York, New York; Who's Afraid of Red Yellow Blue III, 1966-1967, oil on canvas, 96 x 214", Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Who's Afraid of Red Yellow Blue IV, 1969-1970, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 2238", collection of Annalee Newman, New York, New York. Return
14 For this connection with Newman, and a significant adumbration in Matisse, see Yve-Alain Bois, "On Matisse: The Blinding," October 68 (Spring 1994), pp. 61-121, esp. p.112. Cf. Bois' "Perceiving Newman," in his Painting As Model (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), pp. 186-213. Return
15 The association of horizontality with quiescence and verticality with activity are doubtless grounded in the proprioceptive kinesthetic experience of one' embodiedness, and as such, along with other dichotomies such as light / dark, and presence to / absence from, constitute a basis for fundamental and universal tropes. Return
16 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 83. Return
17 The phrase is borrowed from Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Return
18 See Hillary Putnam, Foreword to Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 1983), pp. xiv-xv. Return
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