More thoughts regards show at CO. And other matters; David Goldes told me that painter film director Julian Schnabel liked my big painting at the Walker Art Center (in Midnight Party). Apparently he was really taken with my painting and I was very happy to have a new admirer. The painting has always been difficult for me since it seemed to precipitate my first nervous breakdown it sort of personifies my extreme position in this work which included nearly two years of work on the 8 by 7' canvas. The Walker was very happy to recieve the painting as a gift that is quite unique in their collection and my work. Tomorrow night a conversation interview with Robyne Robinson at Co exhibitions. I took Betsy Carpenter (a Walker curator) over to CO yesterday she enjoyed the exhibition she's working on my solo show at Walker scheduled to open next February. This CO show helps me understand how expansive my work is how it spreads into a space and occupies a sort physical and psychic space. The color does much of this at the scale and pitch I use color and scale. The disturbing images don't bother audiences today as much as they did 20 years ago and I always thought criticism about content were a bit hysterical after all it's only a picture.
I've always been interested in the over all picture a picture which is a surface and a decoration that covers the whole surface say like in Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and in many 1960's artists who were interested in an overall field like Larry Poons or any of a number artists who made over all type patterned paintings. No point in the picture is any more important than any other point or area. Bridget Riley's paintings also illustrate this tendency and it was in the air by the mid-1960's . It was a logical extension of Pollock's overall paintings which broke with the figure ground and other figurative conventions that proceeded his work. And at the time art journals were heavily commited to formalism and a sort reasoned abstraction (like say Frank Stella's early over all geometric so called black paintings). Of course pop art sort of tipped the art world towards image and content and a sort of cold war existed between different schools of late modernism. Clement Greenburg and his student Michael Fried were heavily into supporting the abstraction that derived from Pollock. Formalism was an attempt to give modernism a particular form, certain artists say Manet and Cezanne were the father's of this formalist tendency. It was very convincing arguement Greenburg fronted that Pollock had set the outside limits of control and radicality of abstraction. And I agreed Pollock was the new number one but the image was left as abstraction. The image was tainted by it's very subjectivity it could'nt be formal or quantified like a Frank Stella painting. Images were re appearing in Pop Art banal but still soup cans and comics and it did seem awfully seductive the sudden flow of pop images, it was art about common things not aristocratic or religious but just the world around us.
Greenburg was very keen on Jules Olitski another painter with an overall style and I think Larry Poons was related to the scheme though Poons was really out on the fringes pretty all his subsequent career. Poons early work herlped me understand abstraction and the sense of the surface as a field. The image thing is more dicey aside from the Pop Art imaging a lot of new images appeared as did more formal art works like Donald Judd and Smithson etc. The field was beginning to become more complex and more diverse. Peter Saul who I knew briefly in my last term in graduate school at CCAC he was a visiting artist at the San Francisco art school and arts aand crafts in Oakland. I knew his paintings from Chicago he was a regular in Allan Frumkin's gallery on Ontario Street. He was an influence and a sort of existential hero to me. His anti-Vietnam paintings were among his best as they exploited his earlier genius to a political end and an aesthetic ambition to be taken as seriously by the formalist the Greenburg mafia.. And he was correct that the corporate minimalist style gave the regime a very plain image minus anything too distressing like children on fire in Nam. Saul painted wildly hyperbolic works swirling with violence represented with great inventive skills. My collision with Saul in 1968 was very intense my work then was very much formalist and imagist both but a curious obsession with coloring book and childrens workbook images. I used a relatively restrained palette compared to past few decades where I light a fire in the paintings with day-glo colors. Saul put me in a position to change my work and make it even more personal and more extreme in form. After several years in Saul's thrall I started a return towards my formalist side but I retained my image fascinations. I wanted to return to the all over composition like the painting up now at the Walker Untitled Painting 1972-4 and that was where started to coalese the over all image not abstract but cartoon like faces hundreds of them in myriad colors. For me it was Barnett Newman collides with millions of Dick Tracys! The high art and the low art on the same scale plus the huge time invested in my painting nearly 2 years worth of cartoon faces! Which is why I think it's such a twistie paintings it is Wittgenstein meets Image of cartoon faces like the faces of the Sephiroth. Hundreds maybe thousands of faces trying to break the rules and bust through the party line a world after abstraction, after all the sturm und drang something more innocent and maybe sick and beautiful both?