A RETURN TO ALIEN ROOTS:
PAINTING OUTSIDE MAINSTREAM WESTERN CULTURE
Lynn M. Randolph
Gallery talk at the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, May 1, 1990.

This is an attempt to explain my biases, to let you know some of my current intellectual positions, and to try to articulate aspects of the underlying consciousness that surfaces in my paintings. I will also share some of the concerns I have regarding my particular field of cultural production.

All of us who attempt to produce art are effected by the role of the artist as it has been socially constructed over recent history. Many of us grew up thinking of artists as "very special people," the image was primarily of a male, eccentric to the point of madness, impoverished, extravagantly irresponsible, above dealing with the mundane, inarticulate-- something of a noble savage, something of an enfant terrible. I will not dwell on this, other than to note how different this is from the experience of most women artists, particularly those of us who are mothers. These roles clearly do not combine easily. Perhaps both need to be de-mythologized.

I do not want to sound defensive, but as the very title of this talk suggests, over twenty years ago I set a course in opposition to mainstream Western painting, resisting modernism's nearly exclusive concern for the sequencing of differences in linear illusions of progress (the avant garde) and formalism (art about art). I rebelled when abstraction triumphed over the figure and when, in pursuit of the sublime, empty universalism (transcendentalism) was elevated over earthly evidences of the human spirit. I remained committed to painting, specific people, places, and things.

For me, art is not just about art, and while I appreciate the work of many artists who created new awarenesses of perception (Monet's dazzling perception of light, Cezanne's translation of nature to paint in the late water colors, and Picasso's new "technologies" --just to name a few.) too great a price may have been paid for such insights, as modernism concentrated on the formal aspects of art and detached itself from the burdens and richness of social and political life.

Don't misunderstand, I believe that craft, technique, and what we call style are very important. However, these are only important insofar as they serve the painting's seductiveness, the adequacy with which the content is communicated.

I know that many artists in the fifties and sixties sought to achieve a kind of spiritual transcendence by the distillation of paint to its formal qualities. Notable among these was Phillip Guston who wrote,

He changed and painted recognizable objects that contained meaning. And I think it was his best work.

There are two [formal] elements of art that I would like to discuss in more detail, they are texture and subject matter. It seems to me that currently there is an overly determined concern on the part of curators and critics [as well as teachers] of painting (most of whom were schooled in modernist conventions of seeing) for surface manipulation, texture, and the visible testimony of the artist's power over it. This privileging of texture appears out of proportion to other equally significant formal qualities like those of composition, form, color, shape, and line.

Some of this privileging of texture may be a response to current trends toward mechanical reproduction (photography and video art) and a desire to differentiate painting as traceable to the human mark. There are many historical references that equate the canvas to skin or membrane, including some that designate the brush as penis. It is almost as if, when the figure--the literal skin--receded or was banished from view and abstract art took center stage, artists distanced themselves even further with thicker and thicker layers of paint, until paint dominated any possible configuration. Additionally, other materials and objects were glued or affixed in many different ways to the surface--one is reluctant to say incorporated. And this may also have been a way of distancing art not only from the body, but from the underlying psyche, the hidden self. (Ironically, this freeing of the psyche was the very content that was promised by the initial generation of abstract expressionists, who mostly produced premature fatality, repetitious permutation and combination, and embarrassed obscurantism.)

If you think of the medium (paint) as costume and the canvas as skin, it suggests that a painting's meanings are often attached to the various levels and depths with which they reveal themselves. When I'm painting a human figure--for me it is a multiple layering of thin paint, a kind of sculpting with paint, or a patient fleshing out, I can feel in my own body the body parts I'm working on. This is an important and confirming experience that is lost when I shift my concern to the aesthetic aspects which are also crucial.

This brings me to the other element I mentioned earlier: subject matter or content. I want the viewer of my painting engaged by the subject matter itself, and not by mere surface manipulation or traditional views of formal ideals in art. There are some old ways of seeing which rarely have been recognized, ways exemplified in the experience of viewing the landscapes in Fifteenth Century Sienese paintings (The Master of the Osservanza) or the heightened sense of realism in Flemish artist, Jan Van Eycke's paintings of the same century. Such painting often provokes--perhaps one might better say, inspires--a state of mind in the viewer that mirrors the content of the painting. (See: Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. University of Chicago Press: 1983)

In going from the specific physical object to the metaphysical, via the metaphoric arrangements and juxtapositions of objects, the content or subject must bind itself to the structures and forms in which it occurs. Every element--color, form, shape, line, texture, composition--is rendered to support, reinforce and interpret the meaning of the image, the subject.

However, "in a culture where aesthetic qualities (form, style, and technique) are privileged over subject matter, an attraction to the latter," as feminist psychoanalytic critic, Jane Gallop notes, "is in some way forbidden and embarrassing. It is what marks [someone] as a lay [person) rather than a connoisseur that attraction [to subject matter] becomes for many of us who have a stake in our cultural sophistication stupid, naive, unmentionable. How can we admit our resemblance to the twelve year old girl who simply loves all pictures of horses, regardless of their formal and technical qualities? Because the attraction to subject matter is in someway forbidden by civilization, that attraction is charged and ambivalent ... We experience the relation to subject matter in art as forbidden, powerful, desiring, and embarrassing." (Marcia Tucker paraphrasing Jane Gallop in Art Forum, XXXVIII: 3 (Nov.) p. 143)

Currently there is an observable shift going on in the art world that started in the 1960s with Pop Art and the mass media (TV and advertising) that has permeated high culture and has expanded the current aesthetic to include subject matter without necessarily privileging it. However, style and technique still dominate the subject and content of painting in "mainstream" thinking.

At this point it might help to more fully describe my own painting process and intentions. I have visions. Sometimes I feel like there is a screen in my head and I run images across it. often there are just fragments. Occasionally, a complete image will jolt me. Those almost always lead me into a painting. At other times a fragment or memory will attach to another image and give me the jolt I need to pursue it. Its like there are many images waiting to make their presence known. It is as if they merge and inform each other as they wait at the edge of consciousness. When they move into the center and stop, I connect with them and go with them into a painting. I sort of stand still and wander. There is a a sense of "rightness" about them, as if they had their own ethical integrity which I cannot violate.

This year I've come to understand how fully my visions are informed by all aspects of myself--my perceptions, my experiences in the world, my values. Somehow, because they are not fully ratiocinated, I've always felt they were other and mystical.

Visions are not my only source of images. Often I am enchanted by things in nature--flowers, insects and their works, people, or "a certain slant of light". When something or someone attracts my eye and holds it intensely, they too are incorporated into my painting. I use nature like a lot of ancient religions do, as a metaphor for states of being. The backgrounds in my work--oceans, woods, or the Big Bend desert of Texas I love so much--are used as a free form for the projection of the unconscious. outer space has more recently absorbed my interest as a place to ground my images.

Many artists have deeply influenced my work and I'll just mention the major ones which were both formative and persistent: Flemish painting of the 15th Century--particularly Jan Van Eycke; Rembrandt; 15th Century Sienese painting; Native American sensibility; Indian and Persian art; Mexican art--especially 19th Century Retablos and Exvotos, the work of Freda Kahlo and Remedios Varo; and, I can't over-look Rene Magritte.

I am an imagist. I see my painting as corresponding to literature, as poetic. My palette is to me what a pen or typewriter is to a poet. I believe that the closest we ever get to truth is through metaphors and I think of my painting as metaphoric realism. I use the word "real" to mean resembling the real, feeling real, not naturalistic.

If you infuse the composition,, colors and forms of a painting with emotions, they often appear naive, like children's art or folk art. My paintings have a naive quality because I let my feeling for what I am painting dominate the technique much like Henri Rousseau and Freda Kahlo did. I juxtapose various realistically rendered objects together in an unrealistic, contradictory, paradoxical, or humorous context, creating a meta-metaphor. Metaphoric realism is a literary term and describes a kind of text. Images can constitute metaphors that can be read/interpreted. Much of pre-modern art expressed such "readable" content, content that evoked profound religious feelings and values. In this same way I attempt to make art that demands being read, read in the way the Native Americans read their sand paintings, the Hindus tell the stories of their gods, and the 19th Century Mexican retablo artists read their personal devotional objects. This language of images requires a different kind of participation from the viewer than that of modern art--it asks to be interpreted, not just appreciated.

"Religion it has frequently been said, both articulates and responds to the life experience, the ideas and ultimate concerns of human beings and communities," says Margaret Miles. (Images as Insight. Boston: Beacon Press. 1985. p.1) In this sense I consider my painting religious, because I believe that art, too, can articulate and respond to life in the deepest sense. I paint to interpret the evidence of our condition in our time.

The task of representing the world becomes more complex as we come to appreciate how the social construction of our culture advantages some over others and speaks to some and not others. I want to recover that which has been de-formed and marked by institutions of culture as unacceptable, as alien. I paint images that have moral value, images that affirm and challenge as well as confront, images that connect to the consciousness of others. I feel obligated to try to intervene, to bring suffering to the surface, to distribute others' pain, and to centralize the marginal, cross historical and cultural lines, to make images (to imagine) a visual language (not style) that articulates some of the parameters of existence in the late 20th Century.

As a feminist artist I would like to briefly mention one of our current dilemmas. We are caught between essentialist and deconstructive points of view. This places the creative person in a difficult and challenging position. To attempt to reconstruct a sense of the real after being freed from illusion by prior deconstructive effort, knowing that it also is tainted by time and place, by the shifting relationships of uttering and utterance, requires a sense of the ironic. our idioms will have to follow an "enlightened false consciousness, an open language that anticipates its own inevitable struggle with a changing world.

I think we need to create a new image of women out of the full diversity of women's experience, a new image that embraces contradiction and engages difference. We are in the process of re-making ourselves, images, and the world. This is no small task. For example, right now I have no image in my head that represents female sexuality that is not tainted by the exploitation of past representations.

The American art scene today is more pluralistic than it has ever been in all my working years. There are many artists out there working in diverse ways who share with me, as cultural workers, an on-going project for political, social and spiritual change.