Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language games (which, under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize into a real unity. But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror.
Jean-François Lyotard 1
Gordon Young's figurative works combine strength of drawing, accomplished deployment of the cuisine of painting and the process of collage, and mastery of spatial construction as correlatives of the complexity of human relationships. Through the juxtaposition of images and the superpositioning of layers of images, Young's drawings and paintings thematize and employ the Kantian synthetic a priori forms of intuition underlying the possibility of experience, space and time, as the situation of appearing of things beside each other and one after another. 2 This Kantian root, and the utililzation of collage both as a material process and as a structural and compositional method, 3 would seem both to place Young's works within a modernist paradigm and yet to deny it that placement. This aporia is worth examining as a way into the situation of these works.
Modernist aesthetics arguably opens with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoön, 4 in the radical separation of spatial modes of sculpture and painting from the temporal modes of poetry and literature, in a move resting on Kant's distinguishing of the forms of synthetic a priori intuition. Modernist aesthetics is given a seminal formulation in Clement Greenberg's "Towards a Newer Laokoön,"5 in which Lessing's move is again deployed to separate avant-garde and kitsch, high and low art. In Gordon Young's works (as in any works entailing collage as a material process or as a method of composition), the practices of juxtaposition and superposition at once employs the underlying conceptual ground by manifesting the spatial and temporal modes in the work, and subverts that conceptual ground by combining both spatial and temporal modes in a spatial work. The simultaneous manifestation and negation of the conceptual ground is inscribed in the correlative assertion and denial of the material ground. As Rosalind Krauss urges:
As a system, collage inaugurates a play of differences which is both about and sustained by an absent origin: the forced absence of the original plane by the superposition of another plane, effacing the first in order to represent it. Collage's very fullness of form is grounded in this forced impoverishment of the ground-a ground both supplemented and supplanted. . . . But in collage, in fact, the ground is literally masked and riven. It enters our experience not as an object of perception, but as an object of discourse, or representation. 6
Since the modernist turn is fundamentally that of a reductivist, purist, essentialist move of reducing a medium to that which is regarded as essential to the medium, so as to purify the employment of the medium of that which is regarded as not essential to the medium, 7 to conflate spatial and temporal modes within a work is to obviate the modernist turn. Thus postmodernism as a reaction against Greenberg's formulation of modernism. The matter is not so simple for neither modernism nor postmodernism are in themselves the simple and hegemonic practices by which they are conveniently caricatured. Certainly the relation of the postmodern to the modern is not simply that of chronology. There is cogency, apparent contradiction notwithstanding, in Jean-François Lyotard's urging that:
A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, and this state is constant. 8
Cogency, because the apparent contradiction of the temporal inversion in Lyotard's assertion makes clear that the matter is not simply one of chronology signified by 'post-'. The matter can be formulated in other terms, on other grounds. One alternative formulation of the matter is also Lyotard's:
I shall call modern the art which devotes its "little technical expertise" (son "petit technique"), as Diderot used to say, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible: this is what is at stake in modern painting. But how to make visible that there is something which cannot be seen? Kant himself shows the way when he names "formlessness, the absence of form," as a possible index to the unpresentable. 9
Formless, informe, entails:
locating certain operations that brush modernism against the grain, and of doing so without countering modernism's formal certainties by means of the more reassuring and naïve certainties of meaning, On the contrary, these operations split off from modernism, insulting the very opposition of form and content-which is itself formal, arising as it does from a binary logic-declaring it null and void. 10
Of the operations which might serve to "brush modernism against the grain" the most sweeping is practice not as an enterprise conducted within a medium, but "rather in relation to a set of operations on a set of cultural terms, . . ." 11
Among the sets of cultural terms Young engages are conventions of visual representation in two dimensions. In Dog Showing Blonde, for example, there are passages referencing action painting, schematic diagrams, halftone reproduction (carrying with this an inevitable reference to Roy Lichtenstein), and in the bricolage of this ensemble of conventions, an inevitable reference to the layered works by David Salle such as We'll Shake the Bag, 1980. Zigzag white linear forms float over the field of Dog Showing Blonde, functioning as a repoussoir to iterate the image plane and open the space oveer which they are superimposed, while alluding to form in plan of Barnett Newman's Zim Zum I. 12 The yellow-green heads of the figures in the foreground, and the white circle at the lower left similarly move forward, while the four male burnt sienna figure are under and behind. At the upper right, the yellow passage of the field with black linear schematic representations of fence and woman and dog shift from the congeste space occupied by the male figures to a more open space. Within the juxtaposition and superposition of elements in Dog Showing Blonde or Three Sisters or Trapped, Young deploys a multiplicity of representational signifiers, shifting the surface from opaque to transparent, thick and thin, proximal and distal, manifesting the écriture and touche 13 in paint as trace of the painter's hand and the denial of the painter's hand in the quotation of the syntax of photomechanical reproduction by halftone screen. This multiplicity of representational signifiers both serves to make visible the conventionality of the several means of visual representation and serves as an analog of the complexity of relationships between the figures represented. As the relationships between figures are complex and polyvalent, so also are the means by which the figures are represented. The narrative of the works is thus not a matter of a single, univocal determinate reading, but of a shifting between voices, each taken up and given relative attention and weight in the viewer's response to the work, the degree of attention and weight given each being conditioned by what the viewer brings to the encounter with the work.
Even when the narrative seems more nearly linear, and for that perhaps more seemingly univocal, as in Red Stockings, there remains an aspect of openness that resists a determinative closure. The girl with the prominent red stockings at the upper center of the field seems the fulcrum of the relationship between the woman at the left and the man at the right, their respective gaze cutting diagonally across the field. Past the woman, distant at much smaller scale, a gray male figure walks away, looking back over his shoulder; perhaps the same male figure at the lower right of the field, and perhaps not. The narrative implicit in this relationship resists an ultimate determination.
The narrative is no less implicit in the large graphite drawings. It is uncertain if the shift of scale of the two juxtaposed figures in the S. W in W. S. and Ah, Budapest drawings is a function of the same figure represented twice, or of two different figures; the latter drawing reiterates the shift in scale with a shift in syntax between the more rendered face in the upper register withthe vigorously drawn lower register.
Combining the vocabulary of vigorous paint handling derived from abstract expressionism with a figurative, narrative structure, and deploying an array of representational modes, Young's works are visually rich evocations of the complexity of the psychology of intersubjective relationships. If the narrative remains open, this openness is integral to the content of the works. As Umberto Eco has urged:
In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perpectives from which it can be viewed and understood. 14
| Three Sisters | oil on canvas, collage | 72 x 60 inches |
| Red Stockings | oil on canvas | 60 x 48 inches |
| The Soiled Night Shirt | oil on canvas | 60 x 48 |
| The Mandarin | oil on canvas | 60 x 48 inches |
| Dog Showing Blonde | oil on canvas, collage | 72 x 60 inches |
| Burying Boucher | oil on panel | 36 x 24 inches |
| The Street Magician | oil on panel | 48x36 inches [diptych] |
| S. W. in W. S. | graphite on paper | 60 x 73 inches |
| Washington Square | graphite on paper | 75 x 60 inches |
| Ah Budapest | graphite on paper | 54 x 48 inches |
| The Victim | graphite on paper | 54 x 48 inches |
| Trapped | oil on canvas, collage | 84 x 60 inches |
Dallas artist Gordon Young is Professor of Art at Richland College. His recent exhibitions include: Gordon Young, Craighead-Green Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 2000; Susan Miller and Gordon Young; de collé, Brazos Gallery, Richland College, 1999; New Works by Gordon Young, Hickory Street Annex, Dallas, 1990.
The phrase 'collage principle' indicates that collage does not mean simply one artistic technique among many, but reveals a basic attitude to artistic activity which pervades the whole of modern art. A collage unites in a composition elements which originate from the civilized environment, bear traces of modification, and are thereby socially mediated. . . . Collage transposes received reality, as seen through the filter of civilization, into an artistic world ripe for reconstitution. There is nothing real that might not become an element in collage. . . . The principles and techniques of composition in collage--such as the selection of seemingly incompatible materials, assembly and destruction, integration and disintegration, superimposition, juxtaposition and confrontation--also govern the experimental work which takes place in other artistic disciplines, . . . "return