I was very happy with the reaction we got to our last show, The Promise of Reality. Having made clear that while both artists taking part were in my opinion clearly of tremendous quality, my idea for the show and the curating I did towards it seemed less certain to me initially. In the end, the thing I heard most often was a variation on “they shouldn’t go together, but somehow they do”, they being Cheryl Sourkes’ photography and Marion Wagschal’s paintings. It’s true that from one angle, Cheryl’s work appears to self-locate squarely within the conceptual camp, the exact opposite of Marion’s, hers being realist painting with a strong observational component, and a naturalistic approach to the figure. Opposites can sometimes of course attract, and gel; but if the show really did work as a unit, I think the main reason was the quiet, but deep consonance between the artists, and not the obvious but interesting differences.
The thing they had in common, simply stated, was the age-old artistic quest to furnish a coherent and reliable way of describing reality to ourselves, in a way we can ultimately make use of. In this their art, like that of certain others such as Jasper Johns, Giorgio Morandi or Cindy Sherman, acts as a branch of philosophical knowledge. Performing a rational inquiry into the matter – we can call this theorizing – such art can be seen as a valid, if initially opaque empiricist treatise in picture form. Although it cannot perform literal experiments, and must be classed apart from the hard sciences, nonetheless work like Cheryl and Marion’s can be capable of at least suggesting truths about reality; that is, the mere reality in which we seem to live, rather than some ideal or imaginary one. Francis Bacon talked about deforming a subject into appearance and likeness: in other words of changing things a bit in order to draw a picture of truth. And he, like Marion and in a way Cheryl as well, drew pictures of truth by adding some untruth to the direct correspondence we make out unconsciously to things. Doing so, he privileged the meant conclusion rather than one or another academic ideology which spells out what reality is according to the “rules”. Marion and Cheryl are very similar to him in that.
Getting technical for a moment, consider that in a “traditional” painting, the surface of the canvas stands in for the eye of the viewer, or the space just in front of a putative eye, one through which we might see. “Realistic” as opposed to “naturalistic” implies a subject with which we might actually come into contact, and not just an approximation of something conforming to the expected rules of eyesight, which obviously can be conjured by technique to create things which do not exist outside of the imagination. Try to paint a full figure naturalistically from too close up, and you run out of support. But get your sitter to move ten feet away and even quite a small canvas will suffice. By the same token, paint the same person in that space twice too big, and achieve a totally different result artistically.
Like in the “squishing your head” joke, which weirdly implies an important truth about creative interpretation of our perception, we are reminded of the way things are by deliberate creative misreading. People across the room aren’t only inches high, even though within our field of vision they can fit within our fingertips’ span. Recognizing this, we realize that we too look a certain way depending on from where we’re seen. Abstract painting in the forties and fifties grafted onto itself the socialist idea of universal equality and applied it to the notion of all-over composition on the picture plane, thereby revolutionizing art (formally, if not economically). Art which destabilizes the viewer’s perspective, and reminds us of our actual, relativistic universe plays into the journalistic side of the artists’ authorial intentions, and offers us something tangible in the search for truth of experience. Thanks, Marion and Cheryl.
