“I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.

 The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible, unless everyday acts belonged to a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm.

 I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.”

---Mark Rothko

“The Romantics Were Prompted”

 “The symbol gives rise to thought” Paul Ricoeur tells us. And so it does. Works of art, too, provide starting points for reflection. The problem comes in that it never quite works the way one would like it to. Rarely is the move to reflection either easy or polite. There is yet to be an art which does not exert some claim to attention upon its viewers. Art should not be considered within the narrow confines of beauty and taste. If we return to the work of the first thinker to reflect at length on the nature of art in our cultural tradition, Aristotle; we soon find that no part of his aesthetic as it is developed in The Poetics, The Rhetoric, and the essay on interpretation rests for long within these limits. For Aristotle, art moved upon the broader horizons of power and affectivity.

 For this ancient thinker, one art stood out above all others as a paragon of artistic activity from which both the dynamic of art and its relation to the world of human affairs might be distilled. This art was drama, and more particularly tragedy. Its dynamic core Aristotle identified as catharsis; its relation to the world he rendered in the concept of nemesis which is no simple form of imitation, but a sharing of concern.

 Painting is for us a drama, a drama of the highest order.  The artistic theorists of earlier times may not have conceived of it in this way, but that is not to say that it was any less so for them. It remained for the artistic activity of our time, as Merleau-Ponty so well understood, to render visible the grace notes which are the terms of all painting’s success. This rendering visible is not a matter of discovery so much as a matter of creation. Artists do not discover truth, they create truth. And similarly, concern, while shared, is not borrowed. It, too, is created.

 This drama of painting proceeds on many levels. Throughout it challenges us to see our world in many ways. It empowers us to reread and rethink our experience. It casts things in a new light. It does not merely suggest, but in fact posits new constellations of relation and involvement not only in that inner realm where the residue of experience is stored, but also in that larger world where we ourselves must move from day to day.

 In the paintings presented here, the painter has visibly shifted his attention from one level of drama to another. Here is to be found the great challenge of this work. Our first response to this challenge may be a kind of puzzlement; but the two things, challenge and puzzlement, should not be confused. Our perplexity requires of us only that we trace an explanation. A challenge is more demanding: even after the explanation is successfully advanced, the challenge remains because it is addressed to us. We ourselves are the ones being interrogated. At the very least, the shift of attention we witness in this group of paintings, by defying our expectations and giving us much less to hold on to, invites us to reexamine our most basic preconceptions with regard to the form and function of painting. One has to realize that this is no “either/or” situation. Not one, but two kinds of painting are presented here. And thus the question of a continuity of intention arises not just as a question about this work, but as an issue in the reexamination of our preconceptions. Artistic change invariably raises the spectre of adequacy, both expressive and affective. With regard to individual oeuvres, this question is generally all too quickly recast in terms of potential ability. At the larger level of periodic change, the question of adequacy tends to be raised in relation to the situation and focused on the issue of affectivity. One needs very much to see the choices of individual artists in this light. We tend to forget that a painter’s ability to create is grounded in his situation as one who sees. And what he paints needs to be seen as reflecting a reading and implying a judgment as to what it is possible to say, how it is possible to say it, and more specifically how it needs to be put across to be heard.

 The earlier work is highly discursive in both its extensive, pictographic imagery and its mythic interests. We today have virtually no feel for the positive function of myth. For us myth has essentially the character of pre-scientific or pseudoscientific explanation, destined to disappear with the triumph of scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, this outlook can at best only be considered naïve. Truth is not all of one kind, nor is it all given to quantitative assessment. The truth of our deepest concern, in fact, requires a very different kind of presentation. It becomes present to us in narration. Our stories and our pictures, quite literally, give us to see. Similarly, it is naïve to characterize myth in the light of its failure as history. History may stand on documents and facts which are incontrovertible, but it gains greatly from its presentation as story. What do narratives in themselves do? They present possibilities; they open worlds. One should remember at this juncture Hegel’s insight that we need to take ideas seriously because, rather than existing in some quite harmless sphere, they are forces on their way to being realized---the form of the idea is a step in the process of embodiment. In their mythic period, following the Second World War, the Abstract Expressionists spoke frequently of the “idea” and described their mythic paintings as “ideographs.”

 Myths also bind communities and harness individual efforts. One hesitates to say that myth, or more specifically the narrative function (what after all is myth for Aristotle, emplotment---the act of turning raw experience into a story, of giving raw experience form via its organization), provides “meaning” if only because that word has in the last two decades been so grossly abused and overworked. But one must admit that myth, by literally forming or defining a center (the contrasting term would be “periphery”) for experience (past, present, and to come), goes a long way toward presenting in its function the phenomenon which the word “meaning” is intended to describe.

 The mythic features and neo-primitive style one finds here should not be read in terms of either a simple naiveté or some overpowering nostalgia. The situation is in fact far more complex. As much as the neo-Gothic, the neo-primitive is a revival style. It is not naïve. It bears a conscious and willed, critical relation to the phenomenon of Modernism. But in a very important way Modernism has intervened. It is, in an important sense, the medium through which the Postmodern, neo-primitive sees his naïve sources. One should, then, understand this neo-primitivism as strategic in two senses. First, for the Postmodern painter, the primitive exists as a set of pictorial and narrative strategies which have a proven affective history. Second, he wields these conventions strategically to open possibilities not present in his modern heritage, and specifically the possibility of a kind (or kinds) of future not envisioned in the culture of Modernism. For the nineteenth century artist the myth of the innocent eye provided an all-important liberation from an overbearing history. In our century this role has been played by the myth of the innocent. In both cases, the issue was not one of truth, but of what was allowed. Both myths opened paths of movement and empowered the artists of their day. But, if not a matter of truth, neither was it a matter of deception in any simple sense. In fact these myths succeeded because they imaged forth truths that had gone unpresented. It is, after all, the genius of naïve painting not just to signify, but with itself to present before us an image which is a guarantee of artistic sincerity.

 Central to all of these works is the figure. The human figure has played a far more important role in the twentieth century painting than has generally been realized. The figure is the condition of the possibility of the manipulations which have been worked upon it. All these changes are grounded in the figure’s native expressivity and its special relation to us. The figure is, after all, the one image we know most immediately and most completely---the one image we know from the inside. However fantastic its form, the figure retains vivid reference to human feeling, emotion, awareness, and concern. For the Modern world, or at least a significant strain in its culture, there is the distinct possibility that these associations have become all too problematic. The figure points beyond itself in ways which have made it for many a source of embarrassment. It cannot help but represent, even when alone, connections to its world and to others of its kind which make many uncomfortable because these connections reinforce a sense of our own dependence. To be fair, one should admit that this is not true of all figures that one finds presented in art or with art. But then not all figurative painting or photography is about the figure. The fashion photo, to use only the most blatant example, is clearly about clothing and class distinctions. The point I am trying to get at here, is how amazing it is that the radically schematized figure of contemporary naïve painting should take us home to the figure’s native expressivity more forcefully than many of the most finished and completely rendered human images of contemporary art. Could it be that these pictographs in their very schematization are somehow capable of presenting us with a figure more forceful in being both denuded (in the sense that the extrinsic has been eliminated) and distilled (ideograph, if you will)?

 We all too easily forget that the greatest neo-primitives of our century were the Abstract Expressionists of the forties, even while we remember the decision they made at the close of that decade for a kind of non-objective painting or, at any rate, a decidedly non-figurative painting. In the twentieth century, the figure walks a tightrope between embarrassment and the banal. It is hedged and limited on every side. And so I would suggest that for both the Abstract Expressionists and for this much younger painter, there came a time when the abandonment of the figure served the cause of liberation---a liberation for the figure. Of what does an empty stage speak most eloquently, but of the actors which have peopled it? The poignance of the empty stage is in a sense more eloquent than the voice of even the greatest actor to have occupied it. When I look at Chrysalis, what I see figured is an apocalyptic movement toward this empty stage. And how appropriate, if also how disturbing, that the figure should disappear in an elegy.

 The empty stage, our second level of drama in these paintings, is more eloquent because more affective. Less is not more. More is more. The empty stage is not without actors; it is overpopulated.  It is not that this stage is without associations; but that it can render the dependence and concern of all figures, of actor and audience alike. It can say without embarrassment what no figure could even attempt to present without awkwardness and shame. The issue here is not one of abstract versus representational art. It is rather, as Rothko knew so well, really an issue “of breathing and stretching one’s arms again,” of breaking down limits to discourse, of saying what could not be said, of taking us back to that which is our Ultimate Concern.

Len Klekner - 1982

Assistant Director

The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago