On painting as the Algebraic Spatial Choreography of a Globalized World;

Reporting Reflections on a Conversation with Gallerist and Dealer, Thomas Erben 11-12-22

I first met Thomas Erben in 2021, when the curator and historian Monika Fabijanska brought me into the "Ecofeminisms" show in his gallery.  We stayed friends and I visited with Thomas Erben in his gallery, now showing Dona Nelsen's paintings, on a sunny, fair day, too warm for mid-November in the midst of a very problematic COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. It is problematic because despite doomsday soothsayers, rich nations and especially fossil fuel corporations are slouching towards climate Armageddon as though we had we all the time in the world to escape sea level rise, droughts, fires, floods and forced (un-) managed migratory retreat; let alone all the costs and collateral damage of our present and future lives.

I wanted to talk to Thomas about painting. Many people don't know how seriously I take painting or why the formalism of such a traditional genre feels so relevant to my ecological art practice. I will try to explain that in this reflection on my conversation with Thomas.

I consider Thomas a genius at understanding how artists negotiate painterly space and therefore I always really value the opportunity to discuss what draws my attention in his gallery and the relationships he sees between an art practice and the complex and sprawling art market. He says he's doing well despite the COVID slow down. I believe him because I trust how astutely he balances art history and business. Really studying, thinking about, and considering my own studio practice feels like gamma globulin to my system to take in, reflect upon and share my observations. Thomas has a long history of friendliness to both black artists and women that long predates current fashions of attention in the art market but that wasn't our topic of conversation on this occasion.

I confided to him that I am considering coming out of my studio practice shadows and foregrounding the painterly aspects of my practice that previously haven't gotten attention. I told him that what concerns me is how to get past the hierarchy of gatekeepers to bring attention to not exactly the "answers" from art but the tools of perception art can bring to the table. Painting is a distinctly powerful means for artists to draw that attention to new ideas. Implicit, in that challenge is an offhand comment with another gallerist later day to the effect that the work shown in the big museum biennales are determined by museum trustees who want validation for their collections- a serious problem challenging the official mandate museum directors and curators wrestle with, about which Laura Raicovich, former director of the Queens Museum wrote in her book, " Culture Strike; Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, for museum space to be an agora for the collective socio-cultural conscience.

My first language and earliest training as an artist in childhood was as a traditional painter, alongside music and dance. To this day, I draw daily. When I can, I'm in my Maine studio studying relationships between surface, the shape of a mark and my optic process. Painting as a language has been internalized and informs every aspect of the balance of my practice. For many years, I've deliberately chosen the extremely constrained conventions of any Sunday painter: a flat rectangle, usually commercially produced, whose dimensions roughly correspond to the golden mean, often choosing the most banal content: a seascape at the edge of land and water. Mnemonically, that choice of content is a rigorous and entirely symbolic negotiation between the intransigent status quo that dominates COP 27 and my personal effort to overcome the restrictions of that Procrustean Bed, manifesting in the other long term, more public projects I'm better known for, such as The Blued Trees Symphony.

Thomas says he looks for evidence that an artist is extending the possibilities of the medium (not the color of their skin or gender identification). Arguably, I am recapitulating a formal Stockholm Syndrome, by accepting the most inexorable parameters of an unforgiving medium I nonetheless adore for its very rigor.  But I am interested in that exact bondage because I recognize in it, the same intransigence many of us have come to take for granted in the COPs. painting in that captivity is a performative action that parallels, in obverse, my actions as an activist artist: not just the slave master in the expansive works but the slave to form as a painter.

When I study the works Thomas shows and we discuss what uniquely intrigues him, we pay attention to edges, surfaces, behinds and fronts of what he exhibits, I see metaphors in his choices for how whole populations and individuals are struggling with boundaries and edges which will determine our community future, not only humans but entire biogeographies from geology to geography, from culture to species.  My take-away is to reconsider the dance I've made in my own rigid studio refugia, that space that fascinates me where remnants of entire species will survive catastrophes.

Thomas says that an artist's task in the material world is to bridge the gap between the interests of their audience, in this case, serious collectors, notoriously fickle and often shallow, but sometimes remarkably intuitive and what is being foregrounded. It was interesting to me that the word "foreground" kept coming up in his comments, which is often referenced in art history to describe the trompe l'oeil of perspective and planes in traditional Western art. He means it, I think, in the broader context of the formal medium. I think about it in the context of my trigger point theory, in which I apply the rule that, "layering information will test perception."

Thomas asked, what warrants the foregrounding?

I often discuss GIS as the model and the practice of Ian McHarg  when I explain this rule about layering in talks, as I will this week at the Creative Reflections conference in the UK, with the RSA (Royal Society of Arts), Manufactures and Commerce. In a GIS analysis, like the one I worked on with the modeler Olivia Haas from Kings College last year about global fire regime intensity patterns for Arts Catalyst, we layered tons of data to find correlations. Our takeaway was relatively predictable: the hottest fires take place where climate change has made the habitat hotter and drier. What was an arguably unique insight that came from layering in what I know of Indigenous Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK) with my artistic intuition, was envisioning the fires as a manifestation of what I decided to call Fire Tigers, not as the colloquial Chinese symbol but as a conjured mythical representation of an endangered species, which requires adequate forage not only to survive as an alpha predatory but to function as a protective balance for unbalanced ecosystems. That foregrounding of empathy for fire integrated everything I've been thinking about my entire life about the natural world. But as a scholar of science as much as aesthetics, I have to ask myself, where in that process could causation emerge from correlation? And where is my formal foregrounding?

Thomas says it's impossible for an artist to adequately step back from their practice unassisted to make those connections with an audience, perhaps even to identify what requires foregrounding. I told him it's been a revelation in the past few years to work with brilliant curators like Mallory Cohen when she was at Various Small Fires, who included some flat works in a show last summer but put the First Movement of The Blued Trees Symphony in a corridor, or the way he and Monika had settled on my work, "Physical Education" from 1973 and then displayed it as a slide projection series, emphasizing the historical context of the technology.

Thomas says he isn't interested in content. Most artists, particularly in ecoart, are obsessively driven by content. Few of us can step back from our process, let alone our practice, to be smart about market foregrounding. We are too passionate, too engaged too, desperate to be heard, seen, understood to make ourselves understandable beyond the noise of our hearts. And yet, Thomas asks, if I want to start foregrounding the hidden paintings lurking in the shadows that maneuver these tiny formal spaces I've claimed ownership of, how do the questions that propel me, determine, generate, manifest to differentiate the outcomes I produce from thousands of other painters producing millions of apparently comparable works and reveal a unique aesthetic? I want to do that. Painting is still ultimately the most accessible universal Western cultural language today for visual artists to engage in conversations with collectors who could foreground the content to the mainstream.

In 1994, I began a large painting, "The Breaking Wave," (76"x86") as the culmination of forty years of considering the dynamics of wave actions. That interest began in 1982 with a series of studies of a wave machine at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography . The studies were for a brochure intended for Congress in collaboration with my ex-husband, Payson Stevens, who was writing up the relevant science research to consider the dangers of offshore oil drilling in the fragile California Bight off San Diego.  That was the year Reagan took office and he immediately cancelled publication, although the budget for printing was modest and already allocated. Reagan did not want Congress to see the relevant layer of scientific data before they made a decision on oil drilling.

The question of how waves manifest, however and the implications for sea level rise and the connections to fossil fuel production, politics and the chaotic process of change stuck with me and inflected my decision to commit to the demanding ten years of producing Ghost Nets, and ultimately move back to Vinalhaven Island full-time in 2022. It also determined the final outcome of the public art sculpture, Echoes of the Islands; an abstracted ocean wave; granite and crushed glass, begun in 2000 and still a work-in-progress.

The Breaking Wave,” 1994-1998 76”x86” oil on linen

The composition for "The Breaking Wave," had been explored in numerous much smaller works and I had sketched out my concept for the larger piece, which includes a faint blue cross mark over the entire canvas for the point of impact between a high velocity wave and granite outcroppings out to sea. That year, a very ferocious storm hit the Eastern coast of the island during a spring surge and waves began crashing under the floor of my coastal studio. Inspired by the precedent of J.M. W. Turners experiment out to sea, when he lashed himself to a mast during a storm to fully internalize the experience, I immediately rushed down into the flood surrounding my studio to complete the painting. Like Turner, there was a risk I wouldn't survive. Like Turner I spent about 4 hours in the eye of a storm at sea. Unlike Turner, there was no time lag for reflection as I furiously painted what I could see and feel. It was the look and feeling of the storm I wanted to foreground. But is that much different in the end, than any other seascape, no matter how brilliant? Did I advance the possibilities of the medium as much in that painting than perhaps I did in later works, for example when I painted a blue sign wave on trees in The Blued Trees Symphony? I'm not sure I trust myself to pay attention to what needs to be foregrounded besides the fact that if you see the painting, its scale put you inside the waves.

Now, almost thirty years after "completing" that painting, that work and the research that informed its production has reclaimed my interest and given me some new ideas to pursue in the "real" world and in the studio.  But the task I was contemplating with Thomas wasn't to keep producing new work in this line, it was to learn how to point my finger at where my audience needs to pay attention as an unconventional painter inhabiting conventional painterly space. Where is my spatial frontier?

I told Thomas that what interests me is his perception of space and the way he tracks his artists manipulation of space.  It is the notion of agency and the abstraction in paint of critical geopolitcal boundaries that fascinates me about his fascination. In his fascination, he always returns to the safeguarding of the space of the medium. He referenced Harry Coleman's practice and pointed out that I am interested in safe-guarding literal, biological space. The conceptual overlap appears quite fluid to me.

I think we are both interested in a choreographed experience of space sometimes but not always mediated by paint.

I have often said that painting is the working out of algebraic thinking about space, distilled by paint; the relationship ultimately between the physics and optics of light and the movement of the audience as participant, icon, meme that defines that relationship. It is part of what interested me in creating the on-the-ground and gallery installation versions of The Blued Trees Symphony when an audience is required to negotiate painted suspended branches

Trigger point theory work with Princeton students, November 4, 2022

I have been in New York since giving a talk at very politically conscious Princeton earlier in the month. The students there asked me for honesty, not hope. I responded by suggesting how trigger point theory, which emerged from Ghost Nets, and was developed from a calculus of change apparent in wave studies, some as paintings, might imply where we might apply our attention to the chaotic threats of the present. The greatest part of my attention since my arrival just before the American midterm elections, has been to see and hear what my artist colleagues are considering in these tumultuous times. I had intentionally scheduled myself to be at Princeton before the election. Yesterday, as part of a gallery tour, I studied the remarkable curation of the Theaster Gates retrospective at the New Museum. A couple years ago he showed at the Gagosian gallery, one of the world's premier art galleries where the social practice artist, Rick Lowe just had a sold-out show. It is a notable change that top dealers are taking a serious interest in artists who explore the spatial boundaries between traditional and atypical forms. Perhaps we might be delivering something better than hope: honesty about where & how our society should pay attention.

I asked Thomas to write down how he phrased the nature of the relationship between an artists questions, demands and manifestations in identifying where to pay attention to what needs foregrounding. He refused. Since our entire conversation was only documented in the notes I could scribble on a press release for Dona Nelson on exhibit in his gallery, I may have missed a lot.

Perhaps it is this wave of contemporary cultural spatial torque that I will continue to contemplate when I go back to Maine, as sea level continues to rise, literally around my studio and now that I know democracy still lives in some aspirational form in the United States of America. I know the culture needs artists like myself to teach others where to pay attention if we're going to survive this present into an uncertain future.

The art historian Julie Reiss, with whom I had lunch at the Museum of Modern Art last week, viewing the Meret Oppenheim show together, says she thinks that time to pay attention to new voices about climate change is now. If so, it is past time for the museums of the world to pay attention, not only to men who are contesting spatial boundaries and edges but the women ecological artists who have been storming and breaching those gates for a very long time. Both Theaster and Rick have been able to muster impressive resources for their projects. Few women artists can say the same. But scale, as measured by resources, is a means of credentialling for aesthetic opportunities. Arguably, if credentialling goes to museum exhibition opportunities, most women are at a disadvantage because the financial opportunities to realize large projects at scale are rarely offered to women of any category.

Still, my conversation with Thomas made me think that a new narrative with a new algebraic calculus might be possible now.  The year ahead in the art world will be telling.