Wallace Stevens

Holding on to painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

Paying a visit to a painter’s studio is a rare experience, but definitely gratifying. Or at least, it has been for a long time even before I could put it to words. At her studio, I confirm that Laura Carralero’s commitment to painting as a practical activity has an unfathomable dimension, and I was pleasantly surprised that she shared the same sentiment that our current epoch is not one in which painting has a minimal breathing space. And whenever painting emerges in the official market circuits of art, it seems that it is always already parasitical to some verbose rhetorical apparatus or heteronomic planning that distortions the painterly sentiment. But was not painting the task of speaking the engagement regarding  “mute things”, as Poussin would have it? There is little doubt that rhetorical inflation that thrives in mechanisms to legitimate art continuously devalorizes the mysterious proximity of painting with things in the world. We should reflect – or we should continue to reflect – about what it means to be in a point in the history of humankind where the obsolescence of painting and the disappearance of the dexterous achievement of the hand has thoroughly been realized (Focillon’s praise of the hand remains as actual as when it was first written: “The artist that cuts wood, twerks metal or rock keeps alive a very ancient human past that without which we would immediately cease to exist. Is not admirable to see in the mechanical age this stubborn human survivor of the ages of the hand?”) [1].

The task is immense and abnormal, and it defies (because it exceeds it) the theoretical concept and the absolutism of the philosopher. The engagement of the painters – a secret community that still exists here and there, in different geographies of the world – is precisely a keeping of the divine vortex of the human in the abyss without higher pretensions. And there is something stubbornly strange about painting against the mounting force of destruction. Although perhaps ‘resistance’ here means nothing but to hold on to the originary instance of appropriation of experience in the wake of the epochal mutation of anthropogenic composure; as if the end of the species is also pulsating its commencement.

Holding to painting is not just a substitute to the act of refusal (something that I have recently mapped out); rather, it refuses the very negation of the anthropological erosion in its soulful interaction with what it remains outside of language. To hold on to painting means to engage in the imperturbable: what discourse cannot mold and relocate; what previously is poor in language so that a new language, and thus a new world, could emerge anew among the rubble. In his forthcoming book Those Passions, T.J. Clark states, quite forcefully, that no political transformation or epochal breakthrough can emerge without a preliminary transformation in language; and, I am tempted to say, that practice of painting is the topoi in which eye, world, and hand come together in the very act of separation of said renewal.

The terror of painting – only aggravated in the last decades or so, although a process that took off the postwar years and continued into schools of art where militant pedagogues can only shout “don’t bother to paint!” – is the general stimulus of the reified world; a world in which the paradigm of “objethood” now stands as the compensatory empty experience for poignant idolization of nothingness and “mere stuff”. Sure, there is no return to painting in its grandiose historical sequences – Renaissance, French modern painting, the European Baroque, Van Eyck’s optical discoveries – which ultimately means that painting’s instantiation with the tradition is also bare and unexplored; or, absolutely uncharted whenever there the event of true painting. While I glance at Carralero’s diminutive wooden oil paintings I have this in mind at least. There is a return to the divinity of the icon, but it is not a restitution of its theological investiture and its purported liturgy; the pictorial exercise takes into account the structural void in which painting finds itself resisting, for better or worse, representational excess.

And this speaks, I take it, to the muteness of painting as such, which is also Carralero’s silence about the import of medieval icons into the present. In a way, the painterly operation (I realize that this expression is awful) is executed in a paradoxical redemption, since space always calls forth presentism, a here and now. One is reminded of Stevens’ verses in “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “To say good-bye to the past and to live and to be / in the present state of things as, say, to paint / In the present state of painting and not the state of thirty years ago”. The emphasis of the verse declines towards that injunction “as say, to paint”, which fixes a current state of being in the world where we are in it but outside of it. Is not this, precisely, another description of the “Just”? I am eager to work through painting’s stubborn position to this description, which means to hold on to the imperturbable. 

The imperturbable seems to me like a fitting term to grasp what Carralero is doing in her pictures, although with no pretensions to exhaust her pictorial adventure. The solemnity of the icon and its inverted gnosis yields something palpable as well as unattainable. What is being held is the vortex of painting’s mystery going back to Lascaux and ancient burial paintings. Carralero rationalizes her interest in medieval and Eastern European religious painting as a retreat from the unbreathable decay of contemporary pictorial practice as a general tendency. Here the renewal of painting is only possible through the sensible dimension of an integrative imagination. Hence, to live in the present, in the hour Stevens’ simile, is also to dwell in the flashes of painting’s general economy of sensible forms. A new history of freedom can take this as its point of departure; that is, to posit no longer the social functionalization of norms and rules for relations, but to expand the sensible space of the innumerable symbols of existence. 

In the well-known essay “The Pathology of Freedom”, Günther Anders says something significant about painting’s imperturbable nature: “Painting that fixes the aspect of a man or a thing in a picture seems as it were to repeat the act by which each thing is already condemned to itself” [2]. This “being-precisely-this” could be taken as the closure of contingency in relation to all possible forms; although it is also painting in which the contingency of the non-visible in the visible what arranges the possibility of what is precisely absolute contingent as absolute in each picture. This is why in great pictures we tend to feel that the consummation of form reveals as a necessary tradition that, by virtue of being thus, it assume the thisness of the particular rendition. This commitment that weighs heavy in each of Carralero’s paintings is a testamentary to the imperturbable even if we are already entering (or already in it) the eclipsing world of the mystery of the senses, a world that can no longer see the redeeming and unassuming vision that painting can offer.

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Notes 
1. Henri Focillon. Elogio de la mano (UNAM, 2010), 131-132.

2. Günther Anders. “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification”, Deleuze Studies, Vol.3. 2009, 283.

Tradition according to Wallace Stevens. by Gerardo Muñoz

The fact that there is a continuous and secret communication between painting and tradition is something that has been registered in the genesis of myth well into aesthetic autonomy of modernity and the artificious equivalence of difference that regulates the temporal caducity of the new [1]. In a specific sense, the crisis of tradition in the contingency of the modern has the activity of painting as a privileged site because it holds the outside together in a perpetual unveiling; as if the human species were permanently exiting the shadows of the cave every time a hand strokes an animated brush over a surface. Painting clears the site of the inaccessible so that true life can emerge without the crutches of incorporated scripts of social organization. But what could it mean to think of ‘tradition’ in a painterly manner? In a poem of 1945, unequivocally entitled “Tradition”, Wallace Stevens seems to offer a response and an outlook for our consideration. 

In a conversationalist style, Stevens thinks that tradition is an uncontrolled question insofar as it can only be assessed through poetic form. Of course, for Stevens the character of tradition could not be grasped neither in a compilation of well delineated forms nor detailed through “a set of laws…to identify it is not tradition” [2]. As it was for Hölderlin’s practice relation to Greek antiquity, tradition is something that is always missed or unfulfilled from its uttermost strangeness. It is, as he asks in the fifth stanza “an unfamiliar sum, a legend scrawled in a script we cannot read?” [3]. The illegible transcription of what is passed as tradition holds to the incommensurability between what remains unfamiliar and what is already familiar and perceptible. We must resist the attempt at disambiguation, since any relation to tradition must be anachronistic as Nicoletta Di Vita has suggested [4]. Thus, for Stevens “tradition is always near”, at hand. And the hand calls forth the mystery of painting. It keeps a world at the threshold of the verbal. The placement of nearness, however, will be on the side of formlessness that characterizes the genesis of one’s existence. In other words, the true task of approaching tradition is neither at the level of the construction of forms nor about the analogical pairing of historical evolution; it is the painterly relationship between life and the experience in the world that precedes and outlives the time of life. This is what Stevens will denote a “ascending the Humane”; meaning a life qualified by fulfilling the adventure of a destiny that is capable of addressing the outside. In the most emphatic verses of “Tradition”, Stevens shows his absolute nearness to what he has in mind: 

“Ascending the humane. This is the form 

Tradition wears, the clear, the single form,

The solid shape, Aenas seen, perhaps,

By Nicolas Poussin, yet nevertheless 

A tall figure upright in a giant’s air.” [5]. 

The use of “form” in the first verse is most definitely mischievous, but it is also the playful ambiguity that Stevens wants to bring to our attention. One way to read it is to circle back to the sense in which the painterly becomes the utile passage between life and world. After all, tradition “wears” the dress of nature, although this is only facilitated by the sensible activity of painting. Exactly a decade later in the essay “The Whole Man” (1955), and speaking directly to the rise of cybernetics and technico-political technicians that had consolidated their mastery over the events of the world, Stevens will suggest that “Modern art often seems to be an attempt to bridge the gap between facts and miracle…to succeed in doing this, if it can be done at all, seems to be exclusively the task of the specialist, that is to say, of the painter” [6]. Why the painter and not the poet? At a very general level, the two figures are interchangeable; however, if one takes the painterly mediation, it becomes possible to claim that painting has a more subtle expressive footing in showing the nearness of tradition.

Painting is the non-language that  gathers the formless tune of tradition: “The vigor of art perpetuates itself through generations of form. But if the vigor of art is itself formless, and since it is merely a principle it must be, its form comes from those in whom the principle is active, so that generations of form come from generations of men. The all-round man is certain to scrutinize form as he scrutinizes men, that is to say, in relation to all past forms” [7]. Thus, for Stevens the possible tradition is that which creates a space in which a new life can take place in the world attentive to the transmission of forms. Of course, not any world, but to “live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it” [8]. This is why Steevns will differentiate between two modalities of the task of poetry: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience; favoring the second because of how it folds our existence within the given order of space and time. 

Is not painting, precisely, a frozen instant in the spatial and temporal coherence that reveals, in turn, a hidden harmony that never fully coincides with nature nor stands in opposition to it? [9]. This is why “tradition wears” but it is also the transitory body of Aenas, which Stvevens inserts in the poem as a matter of ut pictura poesis in relation to Nicolas Poussin’s “Venus presenting arms to Aenas” (1639), which is ultimately the story of the persuasion unto one’s destiny. As it is well known, Poussin captures in a sequence Aenas being directed to his destiny invested in the arms of war. But where is destiny embodied for Stevens? Is it in the gesticulating figure of Aenas or in floating Venus that occupies the central sky of the landscape? It is almost as if Stevens acquired, as Walter Friedlander said of late Poussin, a “sublime vagueness” in visibility of the inner workings of imagination drifted from the physical imbalance of the activity of imitation [10]. 

After all, for Stevens Poussin stood precisely as the source of partition and the miniscule, confirming the primacy of “imagination” against the rhetorical compression that renders legible the modern abstraction [11]. Following André Gide who had had written on Poussin’s work, Stevens repeats without any elaboration that Poussin is to be taken “little by little” (peu à peu), so that only then its pictorial absorption can unfold against what at first sight appears as a theatrical and self-enclosed translucid stage. This is the distant ‘traditionalism’ that Stevens wanted to reject if the work of art was to endure, and still have the vigor to generate a tranquil and peaceful state of mind solicited by the late Poussin. Painting could only be expressed as a ‘mode’ — which for Poussin stood for moderation and restraint, but more importantly as the condition of a certain sensible order “by which the thing keeps itself in existence” both firmly and invisibly, that is, beyond enunciation [12]. Otherwise, as Gerald Cohen once claimed, tradition becomes the thing that you can only hold on to when it has relaxed its hold on you ceasing to color the genesis of life [13]. And while tradition cannot be fully absorbed by rules or forms of pictorial depiction, it does retain the “good that we have loved”, dispensing a noeud vital in which the divine (theos) disengages us from the compression of objective reality and into the nearness of the eternal. This is the integrity of painting that allows Stevens to proclaim the ascendance of the supreme human “good”: tradition is kept alive by the soul of an erotic deification. After all, “God and imagination are one” Stevens will suggest in the fragments of Adagia [14]. Against the edifice of sedimentation and rupture, repetition and originality, possession and abstraction; tradition will name the disembodied genesis of appearing between things in a “reflected seeming-so”. 

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. “Per un’estetica dellainvecchiato”, in Dario Lanzardo, Dame e cavalieri nel Balon di Torino (Mondadori, 1984).

2. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 595-596

3. Ibid., 595.

4. Nicoletta Di Vita. Il nome e la voce (Neri Pozza, 2022), 28.

5. Ibid., 596.

6. Wallace Stevens. “The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 874.

7. Ibid., 875. 

8. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 904. 

9. Monica Ferrando. “L’ultimo quadro di Poussin”, in L’oro e le ombre (Quodlibet, 2015), 82.

10. Walter Friedlander. Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (Harry Abrams, 1964), 82.

11. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 737.

12. Cited in Étienne Gilson’s Painting and Reality (Cluny Media, 2020), 173. 

13. G. A. Cohen. “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value”, in Finding oneself in the other (Princeton U Press, 2013), 155.

14. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 914.