Further Interview About Sean Scully
RL did you go to his talk?
BG Yes, with Virginia and two friends, one also an artist. Lecture hall at the Hood Museum in Hanover, NH, was packed. Mainly an older crowd, my age, not that many students. But there was an overflow room that used a live-feed tv screen so perhaps more students were there. Friday late afternoon. Sense of Big Occasion.
RL well, a weird set of quotes from sean scully in the catalogue you sent. I knew he wasn’t a minimalist at all, but never thought he’d talk in terms of figures and ground and ‘stage’. I thought Marden’s stuff about figure was bad enough on his monochromes/diachromes [?] but bit much to find scully being religious and figurative!
BG I know what you mean. There was that sense about the whole talk as he read it from a prepared text or prepared set of notes that this was a Formal event. He mentioned the camera going at one point, that is, that the talk was being filmed and recorded. And the ways he talked about his work felt much like an art history class, art history talk. Very prepared, even while his delivery was informal and comfortable. Yet is manner felt fundamentally nervous and perhaps even defensive. I found myself wondering how often he had done this sort of thing. Later I’ve wondered not only how often has he spoken formally about his work but also whether he has spoken to Academic audiences very often.
RL do you think there’s something slightly pompous about his
pronouncements? as tho he’s trying to write himself into art history
as an important ‘spiritual’ painter, with all the back-justification
that entails? or just genuinely started seeing things about/in his
pictures?
BG Right. Probably some of all of that. The talk took place about a month ago now and I’ve been thinking about it. There was a bit of pomposity in the pontificating since he didn’t seem that comfortable with it all. He quoted a few critics who said good things about his work, especially that glowing article by Donald Kuspit that appeared on Artnet last fall, right around the opening of Scully’s big show at the Metropolitan Museum. That same season Marden had his big show at MOMA. Now I saw a lot about Marden but almost nothing about Scully in the general art press. So I’ve been speculating about where Scully is at the moment and how much managing is going on.
I mean why this show at Dartmouth College? The new young Director who introduced Scully is Irish, so there is that. Favors being done for the cultural advancement of Ireland today. Hard to know if Irish cultural ministry might have been involved. The brochure listed all the endowments at Dartmouth which were used to sponsor the show.
Another thought about Hanover is art buyers. Hanover has always been wealthy, Dartmouth in the Ivy League and so on. But in the last twenty years Hanover has become a prime retirement area for big corporate ceo’s, former businessmen, Republicans of every ilk.
Perhaps the art dealers are hoping for sales by linking Scully to this potential market?
Also as you suggest, you wonder if Scully is not now at a point in his career where his place in art history starts becoming a prime concern, much like our slowly outgoing Lame Duck president. Also, these days, an artist at the peak or late-peak of his career begins to plan for his own musuem. Twombley has one in the works, already set up. The Foundation, the museum.
You wonder if an artist these days has a career manager or even team of managers. I can hear them: “Now that you’ve had the show at the Met, time to do X and Y to keep prices up and rising, to search for the best location for your Foundation, to expand the warehouse, to choose the best art writers and historians who will contextualize your work in the best lights.” “We’ve got to refine the Story.” “Let’s emphasize your start in Minimalism and your turn toward Meaning. Minimalism is so over now and people are searching for larger symbols again.”
Scully agains the King
Scully did tell this story against himself. He claims his Damascus moment—his great turn and find–happened on a short trip to Morocco in the late 60s. There he saw the tent makers laying out strips of material on the sands in preparation for sewing their tents. This is the origin of the Stripe as his chosen motif and life work.
(All of that heavy historical interpretation of the stripe sure helped fill out the brochure and the Story. “The Devil’s Skirt” is a new book not specifically about Scully but Scully is using it well to shore up the explications.)
Once he became famous, Scully decided he wanted to have a big show of paintings back in Morrocco as homage to the place of his discovery. He thought of the Stripe as a Universal pattern, one that appeals across any boundary found in cultures. He set about trying to get a show in a big open air mosque on top of a mountain in Morrocco. It took some years of working through the levels of the bureaucracy. Finally the project went to the King himself and Scully waited. The King turned it down. That was that.
It still makes a good anecdote for him to tell. We don’t know why the King turned it down, but either way, Scully’s work is there to show us the power the stripe has had for him, has given him, and the work proves itself against the tale all the more.
RL You chatted with him after the talk?
BG Yes, only for about two minutes. People were circled around him. After the crowd thinned a bit, I asked him about Bram Van Velde. One of the questions in the lecture hall after his talk had been about Morandi and Scully had given an eloquent reply about Morandi’s greatness in spite of his modest means and methods.
I was hoping, I guess, that he would also have good things to say in a similar vein about Van Velde. But he sort of gave a dismissive look like Was I serious? & then said, well, poor guy had no money, had to paint with goauche which is like painting with bird shit, never connected with a scene, the europeans were out of luck then, after the war, new york was it. Might have tried to talk some more but it was hard to hear in the crowd and he was surrounded by others wanting a chat. Also I guess I had a sense he would bludgeon you in a moment if you had the wrong opinion on anything.
He was seated at the entrance just opposite a big wall painting from
about twenty years ago by Sol Lewitt—vertical and horizontal stripes
in muted greens, golds, pinks, and reds, ink on painted wall, about
as opposite his own work as possible. Except for the stripes.
RL Have there been any further “after thoughts?”
BG Well, in fact last week a catalog arrived that prompted many such after thoughts. It is a catalog for a big show on Beckett put on at Centre Pompidou spring a year ago. I had ordered it in May and had it sent to my son’s address in Paris, thinking I would get it there. Many mix-ups and that didn’t happen, so I had emailed him in early January and said please send it. Very fancy small catalog, clearly it was a big show. Looks, from the catalog, like there were only three paintings in it—the rest lots of notebooks, texts, photographs. A landscape of Provence around Rousillon where Beckett had been during the Vichy occupation, a red and black painting by Scully from 2006 titled “Beckett, and a red and black gouache by Bram Van Velde.
If only I had seen that catalog before I chatted with Scully. I could have asked specifically about how he had Van Velde had been linked in this exhibit.
But of course Scully himself could have replied to my question with the information. “Van Velde?” he could have said. “Oh, did you see us together perhaps earlier this year in the Pompidou exhibit in honor of Beckett?” He could have said “they asked me to do a painting just for this event and I was happy to do so. I was pleased too that I would be paired with Van Velde. Poor guy, he had a truly rough time in occupied Paris. They were all so poor, he could not get paint. But he and Beckett formed a great friendship and they helped each other do great work, terribly important work. Van Velde has many of the qualities that I tried to articulate earlier about Morandi. Size, scale the quality of the paint do not matter, really, when the artist works as they did from a burning inner vision of what the painting is all about.”
He did not invite such thoughts. So perhaps it is natural that a cloud of debunking set it a little later and driving to the dump
on a Sunday morning I could hear a voice saying Well, just for the sake of the exercise, let’s do a devil’s advocate examination of Scully. Just how great is his work? We can never tell while the artist is with us. You saw a good number of pieces at Dartmouth plus his own slide show. Is he a great man, a great painter? Is he the greatest living painter? Let’s say he is not.
When you see so much of the work all together in four big galleries you can see much that photos and books never reveal. The earlier, breakthrough, works are huge, heavy, thick. On wooden boxes like big clumsy stage sets or oversized furniture for a giant. The paint is really thick, rough, heavy material. Brush strokes, high gloss, “resistant” even angry, earthen colors. The tonalities are anything but “spiritual.”
They are really Walls. His work spans the turn of the century, from Berlin Wall to Firewalls. These are the Walls of the Thatcher and Reagan eras, the IRA and Belfast, the walls around compounds in Morocco and Mexico and gated communities in New York and California. Walls blown up in Croatia, re-built in Jerusalem and Gaza, borders walled up in Baghdad, Afghanistan. Fall of the Soviet empire, rise of the China of the Great Wall. The hunger, if it is spiritual, for walls. For order, the rule, the right way to abut vertical against horizontal. Color is admitted, regulated. Light not much of a question. A questioner after the talk asked Scully to say something about light, about the light in his works. “It is a reluctant light,” he said, “a difficult light.” He likes the Melancholy at work in his walls. Hockney might be a great enemy for him. Hodgkin. I’m guessing here.
So let’s say his work a hundred years from now, if recalled, will sum up a period, a geist. These are not universal, not transcendent, not “of the light” even though someone suggested he lighten up ten years ago and call a series “Walls of Light.” Scully saw the stripe in Morocco, but instead of taking them as tents, as waving fabric moving, shifting, shuttering in the desert sun and breeze, he converted the tent stripes into heavy metal (he is now painting on aluminum and loves the feel of it), into heavy mud made luminous, as luminous as mud can be but still be mud. There are now sky colors, even greens, purples. Fire blazes behind the stripes in many of his later walls. Pale blues, whites. The paint thins, too, as the career moves onward.
But the stripes seem in no danger of becoming ribbons.
RL OK, enough already with the debunking. Go now with the praising. Suggest that his foundation will become a pilgrimage center for some of the greatest paintings made at the turn of the 21st century. Mere paint triumphing once again over the brutalities of history, the stone drag of failure and collapse. Walls of inner light that will guide millions as art always has into the silences of form, feeling and fundamental beauty.
BG Ok, yeah. Let’s do that.
RL So, how are the paintings? to look at?
BG They are stunning. You know, powerful, beautiful, a little terrifying even. Strange. Brutal. Not like any other painter’s work. Magnificent. Compelling. Intriguing. We could easily bring in other tags—Zen would now be an “old” reference, Beckettean, also maybe outdated by now. They will not be dismissed. Primer paintings of the No. Extreme. As much unlike anything else as anything can be.
thoughtful
