STOP TALKING IN CIRCLES Part 3: A Critical Thought
Here I stop talking in circles about thinking... critically, with art.
Especially when I was young, The discipline to make meaning was resisted. In so many ways, my relationship to discipline was akin to myself. Both can be fulfilling and restrictive. Transient, our eyes couldn’t meet for a full second, anything more than a glance would disintegrate my porcelain exterior. Even with no exchange, the attraction to the fantasy of myself was insatiable. We both made good fantasy because our façades were so direct and clear, ethereal and efficiently digestible, well curated for an audience. We were comprehensively fanciful. Both the ceaseless imagination of discipline (abstraction) and myself were never taken seriously.
Abstraction as process and its outcomes might’ve been like components of a feedback loop, a loop that is the psyche. A loop including: the work, the maker (contractor) and abstraction itself. As I’ve been taken into that captive feedback loop as an object myself, questions rotate through my consciousness: The art and the artist build and, the art and the audience builds; is this alchemy? What is happening? What is beyond the formal, the shell, the mask? Is this real? What is beyond the figure, the landscape, the construction? Regardless of the query, sometimes the best method to wrestle abstract art and your conception of self is frustratingly simple– to take them less seriously. And now, We have a conundrum.
But there’s a rationale in there, An equilibrium to be achieved and years later in my first MFA studio visits the hollow porcelain was crumbled. Guests asked me questions using words I’d heard my entire life yet, I was dumbfounded, naively confused. One of those first visits was with a new friend at the time, Denny, and my memory holds their remarks with me. I thought I described my practice to Denny so eloquently until they said, “it sounds like you’re still developing your visual language.” Such an earnest and sincere moment of feedback sent me spiraling around my studio for weeks. None of this clicked for me. What did that mean? I’d been building a book of literary and visual references for my paintings. I cited them. The paint was on the canvas. The language wasn’t obvious?!? I emailed two of my professors asking for reading recommendations saying, “...I’m still struggling to understand taking the theory and concepts I’m reading and processing that into artistic forms...” They responded and agreed. They suggested I go see more art. I was furious, actually embarrassed because why would I go look at other artists to understand how to make my own art? My ego was pulverized. So, I coddled my ego and revisited my public health training. Anything new you wanted to enact needed to be preceded by a literature review, proof of some aspect of the concept before your iteration could manifest. This would make sense as an artist too, so I took to seeing art as if it was a literature review and did what I was told to do. My first semester of art school was infuriating, enlightening and the most art I’d ever seen.
Prior to that I started painting as an adult thinking about health disparities in grad school for Public Health. Those paintings imbued a very conscious effort to interrogate determinants of health alongside painting, their relationship to clinical health outcomes, structural racism and so on… I had come straight from a different quadrant of academia. And, I declared the best way to work was to adapt the typical scientific method then produce art works using it. I would step back from my work, have studio visits with friends, professors, strangers and, still would repeat, “what the fuck am I doing.” Then, I got quiet, like I tend to do. I listened to people talk about art and wondered about the moment my senses would sync with my consciousness, specifically listening to the silence of myself– the silence of art that stared at me that I didn’t reciprocate.
Sitting with art took courage and humbling. Sitting with art built a discipline. The only discipline I wanted to carry from the extractive rigor of academia. The discipline of building resolution among patience and impulse; to deconstruct, describe, evaluate and synthesize the world. When I recall with any receptors of the world: sight, touch, hear, scent, taste, senses in any combination of the terms, I recall what smears of paint taught me. Beginning with the Renwick Gallery, in Washington, D.C, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). In 2015 and 2021, I picked up the practices of 1) counting to thirty before walking away from a piece of art and 2) reading bilingual wall texts (e.g. one wall text written in english another written in spanish). These became a practice of syncing my senses; a warm up for my mind, connecting languages to synthesize the familiar and unfamiliar. My objective became to identify the illegible and exist with it, not against it.
Abstract painting expanded my conception of thought and accomplished this by folding me into memories of my youth. To think abstractly about the world through art works, to allow instinct to lead and conscious reflection to follow facilitated a deeper intimacy to all the stimuli that engulfs us. Recently, another artist prompted practice of these skills. My aunt invited me to see Amoako Boafo’s Soul of Black Folks exhibit at the Denver Art Museum and I accepted.1 We had different contexts coming into the exhibit and because of that, she made a great partner to discuss his work. Boafo’s self portraits caught a glance of my eyes long enough for my vision to slip into their waves of gesture that created the crest of a lip, the arch of an eyebrow, the blush of a cheek. It caught me looking into a man’s evidence of himself– it caught me interrupting a private moment, something I learned not to do in childhood. The portraits nurtured relationality between the present and remembering my time and another’s, a fantasy between two masked subjects. Boafo’s portraits overflowed beyond the form for me and that is something of abstraction. It’s also something I’d only posited after (un)disciplining myself to accept meaning being built within me through the art.
White on White. 2019. Oil paint on paper. Courtesy of the artist © Amoako Boafo
Sometimes it takes more than ten or thirty seconds to figure that out; it takes a feeling, a reflection, a question or rereading to sweep in a relational spark to digest. This utility of critically engaging with art is empirically ignored or erased. Art is timeless exploration of imagination. And, Imagining is a paramount foundation to abstraction, relational thinking and being critical. Art beams bursts of legibility through the veils that cloak our world. Exhibitions, artist talks, panel discussions, group shows, debriefs, accumulate to a critical mass of moments that reshape(d) my conception of the scientist; disintegrates the construction of manhood that caged in the other, the figureless. This is the power of art en masse; the power of painting; the value of knowledge, or what is to be deemed knowledge or value anyways.
On March 13th, 2021, I sat on the steps of the CAM St. Louis unknowingly staring into the five majestic eyes of Torkwase Dyson’s Stories of Resistance.2 About an hour later I opened an email, time stamped almost identical to my moment of exchange with Dyson’s work, the subject line read, “GOOD NEWS! Re: from the MFA program at UIC.” There were these two moments of respite just for me. Synchronous moments, unbeknownst to me until a year and half later. That was fantasy. It also was my imagination of discipline. Those paintings allowed me to see them. They were there for me as I stopped trying to figure them out and allowed us to dream just for a moment. Today, I figure time was weaving a story around me to tell with art; pushing me, sitting me down and examining a universe of critical thought.
Installation view, Stories of Resistance, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Mar 12 – Aug 15, 2021 © Torkwase Dyson. Photo by Dusty Kessler
The email read, “...I am very pleased to let you know that we would like to offer you a place in our MFA Art program starting in the Fall of 2021 (graduating in the Spring of 2023)...”