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1971: A Year in the Life of Color
By Darby English The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-27473-7
CHAPTER 1
How It Looks to Be a Problem
Each category has its own history. If we wish to present a partial framework in which to describe such events, we might think of two vectors. One is the vector of labeling from above, from a community of experts who create a "reality" that some people make their own. Different from this is the vector of the autonomous behavior of the person so labeled, which presses from below, creating a reality every expert must face.
Ian Hacking, "Making Up People"
It was among modernism's best affordances that through it individual persons could become autonomous of the label "black artist." But what happens when abstraction arrives in black representational space? The art-historical fortunes of Ed Clark, an American painter born in 1926, suggest some answers.
Clark was probably the first modernist to prepare a canvas by shaping it. He presented his earliest effort — titled Untitled — in 1957 with the Tenth Street–based Brata collective, of which Clark was a founding member in that year, following his return from a five-year stint in Paris (fig. 1.1). Untitled is a painted construction in oil and acrylic on canvas and paper collaged to two improvised wooden supports attached to the canvas at twelve o'clock and four o'clock. At 56 × 38 inches, the picture is large but not outsized. Its true scale originates not in these measurements but in the felt immensity and vigor of the closed and crossed shapes they encompass. Untitled is a welter of structural uneasiness. To be sure, these are lines, strokes, and color areas; but their inhabitation of the support is captured better in a quickened vocabulary of spaces, divisions, accretions, strata, swaths, splashes, and disturbances. For instance, although Clark has covered almost all the canvas with oil and acrylic to work up a picture, he also opens that picture out by varying the paint density from opaque to translucent and the paint surface from matte to glossy. The ranging scales of the color areas constitute real intensities. And the paint application from brushed to thrown to dragged makes Untitled anything but the allover-type picture that it may first seem. Throughout Untitled, pictorial stability, if not quite lost, is certainly under siege. If it retains a unity beyond composition, it is that of a consistent anxiety of form. A picture of stuttering strokes among which none settles into a phrase, Untitled puts one on one's toes, where one stays until nothing remains to notice.
These disunifying effects find an unsteady anchor in the compromised rectangular field that plays host to all this action. Internal compromises abound, most evidently in the upper and lower fourths of the canvas proper, where ill-defined areas of color (green, backed by yellow and black) and strict ones (black against white shocked by red) suggest depth at one point and utter flatness at another. Between them, a region of rubbed dry blue edged with yellow floats atop a wetter mixture of tan, white, and blue. But any suggestion that the rectangle's dominion encloses the picture's most salient activity is totally false. The shaping and enclosing functions of the rectangle are canceled — as is the rectangle itself — by the picture's boldest tangible aspect, namely those two polygonal papers collaged into an evocative quasi-triangular form, an inclusion that we see as a pair of conjoined fragments of other pictures but must read as a figure of flight from the rectangle's enclosure. (Imagine a paper stealth, high above the terrain of the canvas, with a northeast heading.) At the same time that it points away, beneath it a packed area of teal pigment extends in the opposite direction, as if reaching toward the green, yellow, and black hues that give it body.
In other words, Untitled registers a number of salient events, though none has primacy. In this way the picture becomes a stage for interlocked and clashing forms and color areas that interpenetrate rather than arrest each other: one event makes another one possible. This is not an apportioned composition calculated for niceties of arrangement; the balance struck, if there is one, is at best precarious. In so many ways, Untitled recognizes the modernist truism that what is a contradiction in logic can also be an aesthetic reality, such as a closed picture plane that suggests space and light, or a flight-figure that in no way figures escape.
Importantly, Untitled subjects color itself to a similar opening out. In fact, the picture's intensive destructuring work privileges color. In addition to its overcoming painting's conventional rectangularity (an achievement that would be extended in several directions by the likes of Lucio Fontana, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis), the interaction of color peculiar to painting is the other main operation for which the flight-figure serves as a vehicle. Well inside this figure's perimeter, just above the center of the overall composition, the edges of two cut sheets run a tangent to each other: one nominally white, the other nominally black. I say "nominally" because the intellectual determination of color at this juncture (and at other less prominent ones) is ultimately an indeterminate, stratigraphic affair. Color is not laid down so much as eventuated, through blends and layers that evoke method and time almost as forcefully as the red streak and splatter (at five o'clock) evoke gravity and hard planarity. On both the ground plane and the flight-figure, underpainting exerts maximum tension against the tentative color glazes that overlay it. If such effects are felt as openings in the midst of closure, this is because the richness of value change, to which an apparently flat and continuous color area submits, opens the surface unexpectedly. For all the evident madeness of this construction, solid form seems to have been atomized in the dissolve of these color areas and the spatiality they evoke at every point.
Now, there's a kind of thoughtless vision that would see a couple of "reds" at lower right, some "green" at upper left, and "black" at lower right, but this limited perception just won't do if we want to understand how Clark arrived at the dissolve. To do so, one's eye must decouple from the urge to fix and identify colors as singular articulations — which would detach Clark's color from the interchromatic operations that make it dynamic in the first place. To attain that dynamism, Clark's color overcomes the historical kinship between color and subject matter denoted by the term local color, already attacked from a different angle by Willem de Kooning's deployment of wet-into-wet painting, which he used first to perforate the outline of the drawn human form and later to explore light and space beyond the constraints of landscape. No strictness of attention to hue will prevent Clark's color appearing decentered, always and emphatically a mixed matter in which colors push through one another without resolving into a known or "new" color. In this way Clark's color declares as his painting's subject what we might call the dimensionality of color, precisely because it compels the eye and mind to do a more questing kind of work than color customs typically require or even permit. In such moments we can to apprehend the depth of Clark's interest in modernist painting as a very particular way to make things happen: "things" essentially nonessential, things as effects of interimplication. At least for me, Untitled is a picture caught up with the modernist notion of painting as a place where real tensions are registered as the possibility of their positive reformation through materialized imagining, thinking, and feeling. Here those tensions have to do with color and whatever structures its relations according to the laws of neighboring, but not interpenetrating, singularities.
Clark made it clear that he regarded color and its structuration worthy candidates for reformation when he adopted a 48-inch push-broom as his chief painting implement. Dissatisfied with the wavering strokes he could not avoid even with the widest paint brushes, Clark sought a painted mark that could confidently traverse the canvas's entire width, something that manually unified it while being less evidently the result of handwork (fig. 1.2). With a push-broom, and using only acrylic paint, Clark could propel a sizable volume of combined pigments across the canvas in one long stroke, its sweep indicated by splashes of paint cast off in the broom's wake. Ted Joans's helpful description is occasionally sidetracked by the ravaging associations that critics and historians are so fond of bringing to Clark's broom:
The floors in New York or Paris are his easels. ... Gallons, quarts, and pints of paint are scattered around [the edges of] his canvas. Each can has colors of prime importance to Clark. His "brushes" are rollers, short-handled brooms, rags, and his hands. ... The canvas might receive several spurts of different colors, soon followed by the roller or perhaps a sensual thrust of the broom tempered by a hand-held rag used to wipe an unwanted spew or drip away.
Most of the paintings produced with the broom feature no fewer than two (and usually three) path marks. They are predominantly horizontal, evoking landscape. Yet ultimately they showcase the modulation of colors distributed across the push-broom's path. They reconcile the painted picture to the protean independence of the stroke, which declares the colored canvas to be a thing while underscoring the turbulence within its wholeness.
Clark thus evolved the stroke into a subject that was neither an image nor a cipher for the impassioned human content of abstract painting. The migrations of strokes across the canvas signal the strident integrity of the activity of abstract marking. The stroke is for sure a trademark of Clark's work and has been its principal subject since the early 1960s. But it is by no means the signature of an autonomous personality; a given canvas always contains a multiplicity of such marks in an interaction that takes precedence over Clark's own signatory authority. Clark's stroke, developed from the far end of a push-broom's span and shaped in the intermixture of paint between the bristles running along its bar, empties from the stroke-as-device any content born of clichéd, showy abstract expressionist interpositions of the self.
The disinhabited character of Clark's mark allowed him to insert a real distance — of time as well as space — between his creative decisions, the actions of his hands, arms, and body, and his painting's record of these gesticulations. Compared with the spontaneity and implied speed of painterly gesture, everything slows and quiets down. Clark's stroke is better comprehended in terms of modernist art's move away from statements of a personal nature and toward inquiries into a medium's natures and its component parts. Clark's stroke, in the prominence and opacity of its traces, and more precisely in its reluctance to be seen as an image, confines its declarations to statements about color. The physical and conceptual work in the art is color's: independent and local to color, not to Clark.
With this, the paintings' evocation of palette work becomes the more intensive. By palette work I mean two things: the making of color that must precede the making of paintings, as well as the painted figure's reminder that a playful and purposive blending — creation, really — of color took place before the paint arrived at the picture surface. (Relatedly, Thomas Hess described "the moving flesh of pigment" in de Kooning.) Traditionally, palette work comes before mark-making and is for the viewer a negligible stage in the fabrication of objects for presentation in a painted scene. Now it follows color all the way to the canvas, where outsized, over-conspicuous brushstrokes become subject matter. Suspending color in just this liminal zone identified with the "before" of painting forces the viewer to apprehend both the collaborative nature of color relations and the decisions impelling them. Curiously, with Clark this never feels like a triumph or declaration of identity. Rather, palette work suspends the coalescence of color into image: deployed as a specific intensity, abstraction keeps image at bay. Clark's mark thus communicates itself to be an indefinite protraction of the preliminary, underscoring what Meyer Schapiro would call the "drama of decision" entailed by creative process.
In this way the broom allowed Clark's color to take a reflective turn that appears the more decisive in light of two shifts in his method. Both occurred around 1961. First, he abandoned the lurid, ponderous color chords he had favored since 1957 for more high-keyed shades, many approaching pastel, that had a concentrated spectrum with more subtle and numerous transitions of hue.
Second, Clark adopted a different shape of canvas to support his monumental images of blended color, a buoyant oval ranging in width from 11 to 21 feet, which he used from 1968 to the late 1970s (figs. 1.3 and 1.4). The implicit reference was to the sun, the source of all light (and thus all color). With the sun Clark was declaring his unequivocal interest both in the notion of color suspended between preparation and use, conceptualization and actualization, and in how colors influence each other.
By now the most salient idea in his practice involved the creation of paintings as spaces for the refraction of light effects, the light in color, in an interminable modulation. He would tell a reviewer in 1973, "I'm interested in the expanding image, and the best way to expand an image is an ellipse," a format with explicit origins in stress, gravity, and a positive disposition toward horizontal relations.
Clark's conception of expansion bears an important affinity to the anti-formal tendency in much postwar American art, which was influenced by Gestalt psychology and later theorized by Yve-Alain Bois. In Bois's account, anti-form understands that "gravity vectors the phenomenological field, separating experience into two domains: the optical one and the kinesthetic, bodily one." Gestaltists such as Wolfgang Köhler and Erwin Straus conceived of vision as a vertically structured field not beholden to gravitational forces; they described the "visual subject's relation to its image-world as 'fronto-parallel' to it, a function of its standing erect, independent of the ground." We experience the image, therefore, as a vertical: "its very coherence as a form ... is based on this uprightness, this rise into verticality which is how the imagination constitutes its images."
In the thinking of another psychology of the postwar era, now informed by Georges Bataille as well as Freud, the reorientation of painting to the horizontal field — most famously in the characteristic painting of Jackson Pollock, "a horizontal antiform as an abstractness uncolonized by the vertical 'one'" — involved a direct attack on the obligation that artworks offer immediate visual pleasure. The ellipse, then, also allowed Clark's paintings to retain the energized horizontality of the process in which they originated even after they were hung vertically on the wall of the studio or museum. The dimensionality of color Clark explores through his painting and indeed his larger project to "expand the image" are, in this pointed horizontality, completely out of synch with color ways identified with head-on representations of the world.
What distinguishes Clark's work of this period, then, is not only the exhilarating openness of its color but also the intensity with which he was devising ingenious ways to achieve it. The combinations of colors, color areas, and shearing strokes, the indications of direction, elision, and decision, operate in a density significantly greater than play. It is a menagerie of technical problems, none existing in isolation and all arising from the shifting magma of the painter's accumulated experience. There is no predetermined formal goal; it's about seeking more than finding. Clark elected to investigate the stroke as a discipline, an inquiry into the work that goes into a work.
Because the work so contains the matter of the intellectual activity and physical conditions that eventuated it, it must be understood to reflect its immediate engagement with the specific life of its maker. But especially when met on its own terms, Clark's work has crucial but unexplored implications for the thriving discursive formation known as African American art, into which Clark was formally inserted in 1980, the year of his retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
It is not enough simply to say that Clark's rigorous destructuration of color demonstrates his distance from that formation; it demands we seriously consider the effects of his rigorously open color work (his defining contribution to modernist art history) on the putative blackness of his art. Prevailing histories of so-called Black Art generally adopt an antimaterialist, homogenizing approach to problems of color, structure, and meaning — problems of the very sort Clark's open color work and artifactual color produce in massive volume. To understand what black modernists' practices have to teach us about the functions of art in public life, we should address the challenges some of them pose to our assumptions about the public life of color.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 1971: A Year in the Life of Color by Darby English. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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