Philip Guston, recovered modernist- iconography and meaning in "fine" art.

I was talking to my buddy Clay on the phone today. He's a comic book artist- and ironically I've been unable to make time to visit him in his new studio at the Pyramid Atlantic because I need to stay home and read for my comic book class. Yesterday we had a phone conversation where I brought up the idea of perceived ethnicity in comics and the ways that discussing that in class sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable. Today I was telling him about our upcoming visit to the National Gallery. Clay wondered whether we'd be looking for Warhol and Lichtenstein paintings (something that seemed a bit obvious to me)... and he wondered aloud who else might be featured in there with art that somehow relates to comics. Philip Guston popped into my head. Guston's abstract expressionist work was quite popular in NYC galleries until he moved away from non-representational work and started making paintings with iconographic imagery. The representational things in his paintings are made in a "cartoon" style- and often include klansmen, boots and cigarette butts.

Clay wasn't familiar with Guston's work- but thought it was strange that someone who's generally pretty sensitive to (but not always correct about)  issues surrounding discussions of  racism and ethnicity- would be talking about an artist who painted klansmen. From what I knew of his work- it was never really clear what the klansmen were supposed to mean. They just existed as icons that weren't ever clearly defined.

So while we chatted on the phone (I'm procrastinating- not finishing the new Hatfield article yet), we both googled Guston and read the Wikipedia page. Clay felt that Guston's work looked a lot like R. Crumb's comics. He read a bit more about Guston's background- how he started a socialist group at one point- something that involved Jackson Pollock getting kicked out of school. Anyway- once Clay felt content that at least Guston was coming from a left-leaning point of view (Clay's own political views are sometimes even more radically fringe left than my own)... he was happy to learn about a new artist who painted in a comic-influenced style.

Looking back at Guston's work reminded me of why I took this course in the first place. Guston's paintings are now widely respected. There was even a (very small) retrospective of his work in the East Wing of the National Gallery a few years ago. When I was a painting major- even my "modernist" instructors who felt uncomfortable with my experiments with "bad painting" and infusing meaning in my work- all respected Guston's paintings for the the way he applied his paint (thick and goey) and the way that his work suggested meaning without actually spelling anything out. I guess he really found a way to "come back" from modernism and non-representational art- even if his work was unpopular at first. I think McCloud might place his images towards the 'meaning' end of his pyramid (see my last blogpost or actually see Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics") just on the other end of the line from language because of the iconography- and maybe a bit north towards abstraction not only because of the way that things looked (not like actual realistic life) but because the visual language that Guston presents doesn't have a straightforward easily decipherable meaning. Patrick Craig, an art professor at UMD says that this is the difference between "fine art" and illustration: illustration supports or illuminates a specific pre-defined idea, while fine art should ask more questions than it answers. I'm not sure whether that's necessarily true and I think there's sometimes danger in that. I believe that the notion that fine art should be difficult to understand is a holdover from conceptual art. It smacks a bit of elitism (it's not "art" unless regular people don't understand it) and also opens the door to lazy thinking from artists.  Arts could be lulled into thinking that it's ok to simply paint pretty  (or not so pretty) yet uninformed pictures or artfully arrange some junk in a gallery without necessarily thinking very hard. However- I do accept that art often requires the viewer to complete some complicated tasks of closure- to borrow a term from Gestalt psychology that we've adopted for use in discussing comics.

Anyway- I probably spend much too much time pondering questions- and should spend a lot more time just making art. Perhaps if it really looked good- and people actually wanted to buy my work or show my work... then all these questions wouldn't vex me so.