All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.

Walter Pater1

Between artist and audience is inserted the artwork, locus of the constellation of signs that is the articulation of thought into the form of the object embodying the artwork. Like visuality, indeed as a construct within visuality, the artwork is a mediation of visual experience. Visuality is distinct from vision, as Norman Bryson notes:
 

Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience. Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.2

How the scopic regime of a social arena is engaged, in the facture of an artwork and in its perception in viewer response, is definitive of the particularity of a given "screen of signs."
These works develop from James Van Arsdale's experience as a musician:
 

This recent series attempts to create a personal environment where all of these points of interest converge in a musical exchange based on elements such as rhythm and improvisation. They are also distorted observations of our contemporary surroundings and the desire, which we all share from time to time, to create a solitary world in which we can roam.3

To derive works conceived as a personal environment from observation of the contemporary social formation and from the desire for a solitary world is to instantiate, at the most fundamental level of the facture of the work, the relation of audience and performer as microcosm of the relation of the societal and the individual.
Musicians, and performing artists generally, are privileged in conducting their enterprise: the audience in live performance is co-present, with the potential not only for an immediacy of feedback but of a rapport. The performance of the work and the apprehension of the work by the audience are equiprimordial, in a sense creating each other. When the performance and the audience work well together, a mutually supportive synergy obtains, "audience and performers had connected to a point where there no longer was any distinction between who was onstage and who was not."4
Painting on the other hand, and the visual arts generally, are for the most part a solitary enterprise; the artist creates the work, the audience comes later, most often with the artist absent. Doubtless many artists enjoy the solitary circumstance of creation in the studio; some, no doubt, prefer to sustain it after the work leaves the studio to find its audience. Perhaps even some among these might wish to emulate Apelles in Pliny the Elder's account,5 and position themselves unseen to overhear such remarks as their audience might make on seeing their work. Some, among whom James Van Arsdale is one, endeavor to thematize within the work itself the situation possible in musical performance.
To thematize the situation of artist and audience in the situation of musical performance within the visual artwork is not to say that the visual work is a translation or paraphrase or pastiche of a musical work. It is to say that the situation of performance of audile works be regarded as programmatic for the visual work. It may also entail a parallel of the situation of musical performance to the situation of facture of visual works, relating metaphorically the space of performance of the audile with the space of performance of the visual. 'Arena' is a suitable term for this common space, not least since response to both audile and visual art forms entails a distal relation between viewer and artwork.
To regard the space of the artwork as an arena in which to act is not novel: since abstract expressionism, or to utilize Harold Rosenberg's alternative term better suited for the purpose here, action painting,6 the artwork as arena is a commonplace trope. The notion of the site of painting as arena would seem to require consideration of audience no less than consideration of artist as performer, unless the artist is conceived as acting alone, without audience (though the artist is always already the first audience of the work). Nevertheless, the act of painting as Rosenberg describes it is essentially solitary, without reference to a subsequent viewer. That the aspect of the presence of the spectator in the arena is not considered in Rosenberg's articulation of the matter is underscored by his essay closing with a passage on the act of painting as entailing the "creation of private myths." In the public myths constituting the discursive fields in which artworks are situated, Rezeptionästhetik, response theory,7 is particularly applicable to consideration of the relation of artist and audience. I shall turn to particularities, but first a broader contextualization of the works in the exhibition will be useful, as this is an aspect of the conditions of response.
One might suppose, given the rhetoric of the heroic hagiography associated with abstract expressionism, that the evocation of 'arena' in Rosenberg's essay on action painting has its reference in a site of gladiatorial combats, or of bull fighting. But this rhetoric is a product of its historicity. 'Arena' can also refer to a theatre, a space of performance, and this is the better reference for the purpose here, escaping the connotations entailed in the historicity of abstract expressionism. This escape from the historicity of abstract expressionism is necessary, and inevitable, for as Plato cites Heraclitus:
 

Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still. And likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step into the same river twice.8

These paintings by James Van Arsdale are not abstract expressionist paintings; we may leave aside the legacy of heroicizing historiography. Yet these paintings by James Van Arsdale are informed by an understanding of abstract expressionist painting, an understanding that is necessarily different from that informing abstract expressionism half a century before.
If the situation of the performance, both as facture and as viewer response, of visual artworks is to be regarded as parallel to the situation of musical performance, another legacy of abstract expressionism must be addressed. Since Gotthold Lessing's Laokoön, distinction of the spatial from temporal arts has been fundamental to the reductivist, essentialist, purist turn within the modernist paradigm. Thus Lessing:
 

in the one case the action is visible and progressive, its different parts occurring one after the other [nacheinander] in a sequence of time, and in the other the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing in co-existence [nebeneinander] in space.9

Clement Greenberg continues Lessing's separation of the spatial from the temporal arts:

What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general, but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure.10

To treat of a distinction of temporal and spatial works is to engage the manner of experience of duration in the work. Developed from the Kant's transcendental aesthetic,11 Lessing's distinction of temporal "different parts occurring one after the other" [nacheinander], and spatial "different parts developing in co-existence [nebeneinander] in space" suppose what Lessing terms a "'convenient relation' (bequemes Verhältnis) between medium, message, and the mental process of decoding."12 But this supposed homology is suspect. The supposed at-onceness of perception of the spatial versus the reception of the temporal as an unfoldingness is dubious; while the surface of two-dimensional spatial works are ostensibly everywhere equally accessible, their surface is never isotropic, but is always already inflected by the defining of the surface as such, that is, by the choice of the shape of the surface, as well as by what subsequently occurs on the surface. This inflection of surface perturbs and shifts viewer response from the mode of the immediate all-at-once to the mode of the temporally mediated. One does not in fact attend to the surface equally and all at once, but rather through a hermeneutic circle sequentially-temporally-employed.
What is entailed in the perception of the two-dimensional visual work is also entailed in its facture: the work does not come to be all at once, but through time. The imitation within the facture of the visual artwork of the manner of operation of musical performance13 entails an initial improvisation of shapes and lines, layered onto the surface as they emerge from the imagination. This layering, like the subsequent reworking with scraped and painted passages, is a sedimentation of the series of transformations leading from and predicated on the sequence of one sensory experience following another.14 In the development of these motifs as the surface of the work, Van Arsdale employs a veritable catalogue of possibilities, which can be regarded as sets of contrasting dichotomous terms: it is characteristic of dichotomous terms not simply to elicit their negation but also to elicit their opposites. Thus:
 

cracked / continuous
open / dense
thick / thin paint
translucent / opaque
warm / cool
light / dark
slow / fast
immediate, direct, brushed / mediated, indirect, dragged
heavy / lightweight
sharp and crisp / blurred and soft-focus
glossy / matte
smooth / rough
surface / depth
proximal / distal.

Selection among these terms, as well as among all the other pairs of oppositional terms that might be adduced, is both paradigmatic and syntagmatic.15 Paradigmatic selection occurs within the domain of a pair; syntagmatic selection occurs within the set of domains of pairs. A similar practice of selection occurs with the determination of color: paradigmatically within the domain of a single hue (less or more intense by admixture or not, tinted or shaded or toned to alter value, shifted warmer or cooler), syntagmatically within the set of hue domains.
Paradigmatic and syntagmatic selections occur as well in the determination of the recurrent motifs: linear elements referencing "intestines, a root system or electrical wires"16 or rhizome structures,17 other references to the structures comprising the internal forms of the body, and geological and marine features.18 Likewise the
 

round areas of yellow and orange are faces of the crowd with colored lights reflected, moving as if to dance with the viewer being at "stage-level," the center of their attention. Occasional light blue-green "flashbulbs" erupt from cameras . . . .19

None of the choice the painter makes occurs simply, in isolation. Every choice is relational, a response to the results of antecedent choices, and in turn providing the conditions to which subsequent choices must respond. Consider, for example, Van Arsdale's Crowd, earliest of the series of works in the exhibition. The scale of the work, 72 x 60, engenders the large sweep of the gestural marking. The work is developed through a layering of passages from stained dark to heavier, more dense light passages. Overlaying the thin, dark brown underpainting, white ranging from thin and translucent to thick, dense, and opaque is brushed and dragged across the surface. There are sgraffito-like lines resulting from dragging a blunt stick, perhaps the handle end of a paintbrush, through the wet paint. Five clustered areas of cracked light green tint enamel overlay black shapes, the lighter value of the green tint acting as a repoussoir to at once to both push the black back and thrust the light green forward. A cluster of yellow and orange ovals cluster with the light green areas in the foreground space. Throughout the facture of the work, the canvas has been approached in a vertical position, except for the application of the light green tinted areas: the poured character of the light green tint areas is an index of the canvas placed horizontally. Lowering the canvas, surrogate in its customary verticality of the body, to the floor is analogous to the use of the 'low' material of enamel versus the 'elevated' material of artist's oil paint: a de-base-ment of the work.20 The debasement, this death of the painting, is the precondition for its rebirth. As Van Arsdale notes:
 

The images not only emerge from imagination, but are also transformed from one sensory experience to another, and in a way go through a rebirth. The paintings themselves go through this rebirth many times with layering of paint. It is common that several other unique images lie under a painting. These are subsequently painted over and the canvas in reborn into a new form.21

What is the case for the particular painting is also the case for painting as an enterprise generally; perpetually having its death pronounced, only to be reborn. But the rebirth of the enterprise of painting generally is only obtained through its continuance in the facture of and viewer response to particular paintings.
 
 

 
 

Curios	oil, latex on wood	42 x 40.5 x 11
Turnaround	oil, enamel on canvas	70 x 60
Macchina	oil, enamel on canvas	72 x 60
Submerged	oil, enamel on canvas	72 x 60
Crowd	oil, enamel on canvas	72 x 60
No Need for Conversation	oil, enamel on wood	84 x60
Constructing Silence	oil, enamel on wood	84 x 96
Factory	mixed media	49 x 49 x 8.5
Sea	mixed media	33 x 32 x 8
No Sense of Humor	oil, enamel on canvas	72 x 60
Passage	oil, enamel on canvas	72 x 60
Sacked	oil, enamel on wood	19 x 17
Avalanche	oil, enamel on canvas	22 x 21

 
 
 
 
 

James Van Arsdale is an alumnus of Brookhaven College, completing the Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, May 1999. Recent exhibitions include: Texas Visual Arts Association Citation '98, Dallas; Paintings by James Van Arsdale, New Gallery, The University of Texas at Austin, 1998; Invitational Benefit Exhibition, Arlington Museum of Art, 1998; '98 S.H.O.W. National, Old Dominion University, 1998; Texas Visual Arts Association Citation '97, Dallas; New Prints, Gallery Six, Performing Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1997; New Texas Talent 1997, Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas.
 
 

1. Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," October's Fortnightly Review (1877); and in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (2nd edition) (1877). return
2. Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) [New York: Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 2], pp. 91-92. return
3. James Van Arsdale, Artist's Statement. return
4. James Van Arsdale, Artist's Statement. return
5. Pliny the Elder [Gaius Plinius Secundus], Naturalis Historiae, XXXV.xxxvi.84-85: "Another of his habits was to place the finished work in a gallery in view of those passing by, while he himself hid out of sight and listened for what faults were noticed, regarding the public a more observant critic than himself." return
6. The term "action painting" is introduced by Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News LI (December 1952), pp. 22-23ff; reprinted in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon, 1959; Grove, 1961). return
7. The term Rezeptionästhetik is associated particularly with Hans Robert Jauss and others of the Konstanz group of theoreticians; 'aesthetics of reception' is perhaps the broadest English rendering, while 'reader response theory' has come to have a particularly localized usage in literary studies. See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). return
8. Plato, Cratylus 402A. Cf. Heraclitus, Fr. 12; Arius Didymus ap. Eusebium P. E. xv, 20:  "Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow." return
9. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry [1766], trans. EdwardAllen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). return
10. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), pp. 193-201. See also Greenberg's "Towards a Newer Laokoön," Partisan Review (July-August 1940); reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. I Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O'Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). return
11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1787 2nd ed.], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's 1965), §1 A19 - §81 B73, pp. 65-91. return
12. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 99. return
13. This imitation in the facture of the visual artwork of musical performance in the manner of its operation is of course a parallel to the traditional characterization of art as imitating nature in its manner of operation: ars imitatur in sua operatione, Aquinas, S. T. I, 117,1. return
14. Edmund Husserl's treatment of duration as entailing both retention and protention provides a useful model of this structure. See Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill, Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). See also Göran Sonesson, The Culture of Modernism: Arts of Transgression / Transgressions of art http://www.wblab.lu.se/extern/arthist/sonesson/cult_mod_1.html for an interesting application of Husserl's model to a semiotic treatment of the relation of modern and postmodern. return
15. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic are terms appropriated from the general project of semiotics, derived from Ferdinand de Saussure's work in linguistics; see Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (LaSalle: Open Court, 1986). Since Saussure, both the terminology and the semiotic project have greatly expanded: see Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers, Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). The paradigmatic plane entails an operation of classification as a function of metaphor; the syntagmatic plane entails an operation of the division of signs as a function of metonymy. return
16. James Van Arsdale, Artist's Statement. return
17. 'Rhizome' is used by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze to describe non-hierarchical network structures. See Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze , A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.) return
18. James Van Arsdale, Artist's Statement. return
19. James Van Arsdale, Artist's Statement. return
20. See Rosalind Krauss, "Horizontality," in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books / Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), pp. 93-103. return
21. James Van Arsdale, Artist's Statement. return

 

 
 
 

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URL http://rampages.onramp.net/~dnewman/varsdale.htm   01.14.99   David Newman