Painterly performances at once bravura and playful, these twenty five small paintings by Bill Komodore articulate worlds and the ways of worldmaking. Combining a palpable presence of paint with a multiplicity of reference - quotidian experience, painting as painting, diverse images from the thesaurus of art history, and literature - these works position the viewer between the here and now of viewing the painterly particularities of each work and an atemporality consonant with the there and then of their referents, iterating within the work the effect inherent in the viewing space of the gallery. 2

To consider at once both the particularity of the trace of pigments and the discursive field of the referent evoked by the trace of pigment is to engage the work as site of interpretation. Thus Norman Bryson:

It still needs saying: painting is an art made not only of pigments on a surface, but of signs in semantic space. The meaning of a picture is never inscribed on its surface as brush- strokes are; meaning arises in the collaboration between signs (visual or verbal) and inter- preters. And 'reading', here, is not something 'extra', an optional supplement to an image that is already complete and self-sufficient. It is as fundamental an element as the paint, and there is no viewer who looks at a painting who is not already engaged in interpreting it, even (especially) the viewer who looks for 'pure form'. 3

The artistic sign in contrast to the communicative sign is non-serving, that is, it is not an instrument. The understanding that the artistic sign establishes among people does not pertain to things, even when they are represented by the work, but to a certain attitude toward things, a certain attitude on the part of man toward things, a certain attitude on the part of man toward the entire reality that surrounds him, not only to that reality which is directly represented in the given case. The work does not, however, communicate this at- titude - hence the intrinsic artistic 'content' of the work is also inexpressible in words - but evokes it directly in the perceiver. . . . 4

That content is the correlative of form is true and non-trivial, an assertion obvious enough to be worth belaboring. Form and content are inseparable, though for convenience they may be distin- guished. Thus, for convenience, we may begin not by attempting to express the inexpressible in words, but in words - the medium required by the occasion - attempt to begin a conversation around the works: a parergon, as it were, which may as well begin by considering form, as if it were separable from content.

Much smaller in scale than Komodore's recent antecedent paintings, these works are based on the sizes of Giorgio Morandi's paintings. 5 This shift in scale contributes to the intimacy and quietness of these works, notwithstanding the animation of the trace of the gestural paint handling, and of the animation of the gesture of several of the motifs. Komodore's tendency to employ closed form, 6 with the principle aspect of the motif parallel to the picture plane, likewise contributes to the flattening of the space of the images, and their quietness.

Typically in these works, the primer does not completely cover the field, leaving the linen support visible through the glue sizing and subsequent layers of primer and paint, thereby emphasizing the field as such and the painting as object. The objectness of the paintings is also emphasized by the thickness of the stretchers in proportion to their vertical and horizontal dimensions, and by their installation without frames. The neutrality of the sized linen ground provides a textured contrast with the paint film of the primer and the applied paint comprising the representation of the motif. The visual effect of this separation of the physical constituents of the paintings into their elements is to flatten the perceptual space of the pictorial field, correlative to the collapsing of the temporality of the painting's facture, making ostensible the several moments of the facture of the work as a whole in simultaneous copresence. Termination of the paint film and primer short of the edge of the canvas produces the effect of the fragmentary, as if the work has undergone the vicissitudes of time and decay, though this sense of the work as fragment does not obviate the work seeming a whole, which is integral to the objectness of the work.

Yet for all their objectness, for all their characteristics asserted by these various devices and analyzable in formalist terms, these works refer to motifs arising from lived experience. The claim of an origin in lived experience may seem strange, given that several of the works, e.g., Ariadne and Dionysus, Daphne and Apollo, Pyramus and Thisbe, Comatas, and Red Pegasus are based on mythological sources. Yet these works too are no less aspects of lived experience, and not merely given the artist's Greek birth. Underlying their diversity is a common origin in lived experience, and a common condition as transitional objects, 7 cathected entities 8 having their origin in the situations of the artist's lived experience. A more useful distinction of the categories of the motifs of these works is found in Norman Bryson's distinction between megalography and rhopography:

Megalography seeks an image of human life that exalts the exceptional event and individual, magnifies personal distinction and achievement, and raises existence to the level of the gods. Against that, . . . rhopography finds the truth of human life in those things which greatness overlooks, the ordinariness of daily routine and the anonymous, creatural life of the table. 9

This distinction can be discerned as a fundamental dichotomy opening within the diverse motifs of these twenty five works. While the megalographic works reference myth and the archetypes operating within mythic structures, the rhopographic works reference the objects and beings of daily routine. Several of the paintings reference fish and the occasion and impedimenta of fishing, e.g., Male and Female Salmon, Fishermen in the Shenandoah, Hula Popper, not surprising for an artist who fishes. So also Escape from the Cyclone, which carries the emotive charge of escaping from a waterspout while fishing, precisely an occasion evocative of the Kantian notion of the sublime. 10

Those paintings of keenly observed details of quotidian visual experience in the form of small objects and animals, e.g., Mouse, White Fish, Hula Popper, Seventeen Years, Shiting in One's Own Nest, Mole Cricket, Bower Bird, and the like are resonant with a long tradition of paintings of commonplace aspects of the visible world: the frescoes of birds and fish found in the excavation of Santorini, in the drolleries of the margins of medieval manuscripts, Chaim Soutine's side of beef. The conviction conveyed by these works is not a product of slavish imitation of detail in a motif brought into the studio, but is rather the result of a recollection of the accumulated experiences of observation, distilled to an economical precision of marks, at once in themselves marks qua marks and in ensemble a representation of the motif.

Red Pegasus references the illuminated Pegasus sign atop the Mobil Building 11 in downtown Dallas, a landmark since its erection in 1921. Aside from its local prominence and function as a logo, the Pegasus motif references the winged horse of Bellerophon sprung from the dead body of the decapitated Medusa. 12 Pegasus brought forth the well Hippocrene on Mount Helicon for the Muses by stamping with his moon-shaped hoofs. 13

Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, is described by Homer as being slain by Artemis at the request of Dionysus. In Ariadne and Dionysus, Komodore takes up later accounts in which the sleeping Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, having fled Crete after Theseus slew the Minotaur. In despair when she awakes to find herself alone, Ariadne is taken by Dionysus as his spouse; she is granted immortality by Zeus, who sets her bridal gift, a crown, among the stars. 14 In Komodore's painting, their bodies dissolve to white contours shimmering over a luminous color field.

Pyramus and Thisbe were two Babylonian lovers, the offspring of hostile neighbors who courted through a hole in the common wall of their houses, here indicated as dividing the field into left and right halves, the protagonists identified as common in classical painting with their names in an embedded text. Agreeing to meet at night under a mulberry tree, Thisbe arrived first but, frightened by a lion, fled dropping her veil, which the lion tore and stained with the blood of his prey. Pyramus arrived, finding the bloodied veil and presuming the blood to be Thisbe's, killed himself in dispair. The mulberry tree thereafter bore only red fruit. 15 The scraffito through the paint film in Pyramus and Thisbe opposes the delicate linearity of the trace in counterpoint to the flat massiveness of the relatively smooth paint layer; the effect is not unlike that of the engraved back of Etruscan bronze mirrors.

Daphne and Apollo centers on the climactic moment of Daphne's metamorphosis as Apollo finally grasps her in his pursuit, only to have her turn into a laurel tree, her fingertips sprouting as laurel leaves. 16 Following the long tradition associating Apollo with reason, 17 one may regard the myth of Daphne and Apollo a metaphor of the attainment by reason of its object, only to have that object transformed in the attainment.

Comatas references , Komatas, a shepherd of Thurii on the gulf of Tarentum in southern Italy, who made frequent sacrifices to the Muses. 18 His master, from whose herds Comatas, selected the victims for his sacrifices, encased Comatas in a wooden sarcophagus, taunting that the Muses would find a way to save him. When the sarcophagus was opened after three months, Comatas was found alive, having been fed honey by bees sent by the Muses. "This story is a metaphor for the artist," Komodore says, "especially in a community where the artist is not understood, which may be the whole world now." 19

Like Comatas, the artist at the end of the twentieth century is separate from the containing society, boxed as a commodity. 20 Donald Kuspit has urged that this condition obtains at the endgame of the modernist avant-garde, a condition that is ultimately no less a matter of the authenticity or inauthenticity of the realization of the self as it is a matter of strategic moves in the discursive field of cultural production. 21 Underlying this condition are two intrinsic, but competing, desires: the need to be oneself and the need to belong to a group of other selves.

Though the artist is within the box of an uncomprehending society, the artist's enterprise perdures. This is a matter of societal as well as of individual significance (as if society and self were ultimately separable), as the painter Ben Mahmoud suggests:

The authentic artist shows us by document or deed the infinitely diverse manners in which each of us can engage in the greatest of human enterprises: the process of the evolution of our selves. If there is a sufficient number of authentic artists singing their lonely and lovely songs from the kingdom of the self, then cynicism and tyranny will not be victors, but, instead, the age will have available to it a continually renewed spirit and freedom that is the necessary challenge to the herd. 22

This enterprise, grounded in the artist's situation of being in the world, both requires and engenders the individuality of the artist, of which the concrete sensible particularity of mark is a trace, enacting a diversity of worlds.

Bill Komodore was born in Athens, Greece in 1932. Komodore received the B. A. from Tulane University in 1955 and the M. F. A. from Tulane University in 1957. He is represented in numerous public and private collections, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Walker Art Center and the Dallas Museum of Art. Professor of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University since 1989, Komodore has taught at Mary Washington College, Fredricksberg, Virginia and Brookhaven College from 1981 to 1989, where he returned in summer 1996 to co-teach an intensive workshop painting course with Brookhaven College Professor Don Taylor.

1. Empedocles. Fragment 23, The Fragments of Empedocles. Trans. William E. Leonard. [Bilingual edition.] (La Salle: Open Court, 1908, 1973.), pp. 26-27. I have referred to Leonard's translation, but have not followed it in its entirety. Return
2. O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1976, 1986), p. 15: "A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, 'to take on its own life.' . . . Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial - the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of 'period' (late modern), there is not time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died to get there. Indeed the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion. The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space occupying bodies are not - or at least are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study." Return
3. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1990), p. 10. Return
4. Jun Mukarovsky, "The Essence of the Visual Arts," Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, eds. Ladislav Matejka, Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1976), p. 237. Return
5. The proximate occasion of this shift in scale was an intensive workshop paint class co-taught by Komodore as Visiting Artist and Brookhaven College Professor Don Taylor in May, 1996. Return
6. For the dichotomy of closed form versus open form, see Heinrich Wöefflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), pp. 15, 124-154. Return
7. The notion of a transitional object is introduced in D. W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953), pp. 433-456. See also Richard Kuhns, Psychoanalytic Theory of Art: A Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Michael Eigen, "Winnicott's Area of Freedom: The Uncompromisable," Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Murray Stein, eds., Liminality and Transitional Phenomena (Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron, 1991), 67-88. Of interest in the present context, see Donald Kuspit, "The Good Enough Artist," Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 298. Return
8. "Cathected," from Greek kathexis, 'holding, retention', refers to objects on which emotional energy is concentrated. Return
9. Bryson, ibid., p. 178. Bryson's distinction stems from his analysis of the rhetoric of a tradition extending from Aristotle's Poetics; see Poetics 1448a ff., that the object of imitation in theatre is persons in action, which may be of a higher or of a lower type, and so also in painting, as "Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life." Return
10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, sect. 25 Explication of the Term Sublime: "We call sublime that which is absolutely large." Cf. ibid. sect. 28 On Nature as a Might: "Hence nature can count as a might, and so as dynamically sublime, for aesthetic judgment only insofar as we consider it as an object of fear." Trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). See also Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). Return
11. The Mobil Building (Magnolia Building) was erected in 1921, Alfred C. Bossom, M.P., RIBA, New York and London, architect. At the time the tallest building west of the Mississippi, the revolving Pegasus logo was visible for miles as one approached Dallas at night and was thus a landmark for decades. See Harwood K. Smith, AIA, "The Multistory Office Structure," Dallasights: An Anthology of Architecture and Open Spaces (Dallas: American Institute of Architects, Dallas Chapter, 1978), p. 49-50. Return
12. Hesiod, Theogony, 280-284; 325; also attested in Berlin Papyri 7497 and Oxyrhynchus Papyri 421. In H.G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914). Return
13. Homer, Iliad, vi. 160, xvi.328 ff. Return
14. Hesiod, Theogony, 947. Return
15. Ovid, Metamorphosis, iv, 55. Return
16. Ovid, Metamorphosis, I, 452 ff. Return
17. See, inter alia, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, on the distinction of Apollonian and the Dionysian modes. Return
18. The Muses are the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, being Kleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania and Kalliope. Hesiod, Theogony 25, 75-79, 915. Return
19. Bill Komodore, quoted in Deborah Bradley, "Dallas painter moves on to smaller things," Dallas Morning News, Guide. September 6, 1996, p. 41. Return
20. See the analysis of the artist's situation in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Return
21. Donald Kuspit, "The Good Enough Artist," Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 292-299. See also Kuspit's "The Problem of Art in the Age of Glamor," ibid., pp. 282-291. Return
22. Ben Mahmoud, "Idiosyncrasy and Society: The Artist at the End of the 20th Century," presented at Mid-America College Art Association Annual Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, October 1995. Ben Mahmoud is distinguished Research Professor in Art at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Return