Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  6

  “MY PICTURES TEND TO destroy each other when they are hung too closely together,” Hodgkin has remarked. No wonder. Each picture is, ideally, a maximum seduction. Harder for the picture to make its case if, at the distance from which it is best seen, one is unable to exclude some adjacent solicitations. But the viewer may be tempted to solve the problem, abandoning the proper distance from which all the picture’s charms may be appreciated to zero in for immersion in sheer color bliss—what Hodgkin’s pictures can always be counted on to provide.

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  TOO CLOSE A VIEW of the picture will not only yield a new round of voluptuous sensation (say, the streaks of salmon-pink now visible beneath what reads ten feet away as cobalt blue). It will also remind the viewer of what is written beside or below: its title.

  Leaves, Interior with Figures, After Dinner, The Terrace, Delhi, Venice/Shadows, Clean Sheets, Red Bermudas, Mr. and Mrs. James Kirkman, After Corot … titles like these indicate a pleasingly large range of familiar subjects: the still life, the plein-air scene, the intimate interior, the portrait, the art history homage.

  Sometimes the title corresponds to something that can be discerned.

  More often, it doesn’t. This is most obviously true of the portraits—that is, the pictures whose titles are someone’s name; usually two names, a couple. (The names, those of friends and collectors, will be unfamiliar to viewers.)

  Some titles that are phrases, such as Like an Open Book, Haven’t We Met?, Counting the Days, seem to be drawn from the history of a love life. In Central Park, Egypt, On the Riviera, Venice Evening—many titles evoke a very specific world, the world known through tours of seeing and savoring. (We hear about quite a lot of meals.) Some titles hint at a submerged story, which we can be sure we’re not going to hear—like the glimpses, in several of the pictures, of the form of a body on a bed. But there’s as much an impulse to play down as to reveal the charge of some of the pictures. Thus, one of the largest of Hodgkin’s recent pictures, and one of the most glorious and emotionally affecting, has the title Snapshot. While offering a shrewd spread of signals, from the diaristically offhand, like Coming Up from the Beach and Cafeteria at the Grand Palais, to the bluntly plaintive, like Passion, jealousy, and Love Letter, the majority of the titles are casually nominative or slightly ironic, which makes them nicely at variance with the pictures’ proud exuberance of feeling, their buoyant, ecstatic palette.

  Of course, the fact that a person or place is named does not mean it is depicted.

  In the Bay of Naples, Still Life in a Restaurant, In a Hot Country—the “in” in a fair number of titles carries a dual meaning. It signifies that the artist has been “in” these places, on these fortunate holidays. (We don’t expect a Hodgkin title that tells us we are “in” a dungeon.) And that, whether the space named is outdoors or indoors, the picture itself is a kind of interior. One looks into the picture, to something which is both disclosed and hidden.

  Some titles—Lovers, for instance—confirm the suggestiveness of certain enlacing shapes. A few titles—like Egyptian Night and House near Venice—succeed in making the pictures seem representational in the conventional sense. But, exception made for such bravura performances as Venetian Glass, Hodgkin is not offering the look of the world, an impression. (An emotion is not an impression.) Hardly any of Hodgkin’s paintings harbor mimetically distinct shapes, and only a few have shapes which would seem even allusively distinct without the clue supplied by the title. The subjectivism of these pictures is the opposite of the one associated with Impressionism: to preserve the visual freshness of the first fleeting moment that something is seen. Hodgkin aims to reinvent the sight of something after it has been seen, when it has acquired the heavy trappings of inner necessity.

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  OPERATING ON A BORDER very much of his own devising between figuration and abstraction, Hodgkin has made a sturdy case for regarding his choreography of spots, stripes, discs, arcs, swaths, lozenges, arrows, and wavy bands as always representational.

  “I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances” is how he puts it. “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.” Note that Hodgkin says “emotional situations,” not “emotions”; he is not licensing the attempt to read a specific emotion from a given picture, as if that were what the picture was “about.”

  Hodgkin’s formula is as elegantly withholding as it is incisive and alert.

  Whose emotional situations? The artist’s?

  Obviously, titles like After Visiting David Hockney or Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi or Indian Sky would seem to be deceptions if the painter had never met David Hockney, had never visited Italy or India. One has to assume that, in this sense, all the pictures are autobiographical, though only some of the titles make this explicit. Still, few of them are self-referential in the narrow sense. What’s on display is not the emotional state of the artist. And the pictures offer the most earnest, emphatic tribute to the world outside, its treasurable objects and beauties and opportunities. Indeed, the sublimity of the color in Hodgkin’s pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude—for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents. Two passions which we associate with this painter, traveling and collecting, are both expressions of ardent, deferential feeling for what is not oneself.

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  SO MANY OF the pictures refer to “abroad,” as it used to be called. To sites of dalliance already consecrated by great painters of the past, which one never tires of revisiting: India, Italy, France, Morocco, Egypt. Seasons in their foreign plumage: fruit, palm trees, a searingly colored sky. And home pleasures consumed on foreign premises. (In Bed in Venice, not in bed in London; the painter is not traveling alone.) There is lovemaking and dining and looking at art and shopping and gazing out over water. The sites bespeak an avid eye, and a taste for the domesticated; gardens and terraces, not forests and mountains. The evocation of sensuous, congenial tourism—dinner parties, nocturnal promenades, cherished art, memorable visits——boldly affirms the idea of pleasure.

  But the titles also intimate another relation to pleasure, with their naming of weather and seasons and times of day. The most common weather is rain; the season is invariably autumn; if a time of day is cited, it’s usually sunset—which, apart from being the biggest color story in the daily existence of most people, has a large place in the thesaurus of melancholy.

  All those titles with “sunset,” “autumn,” “rain,” “after … ,” “goodbye to … ,” “the last time …” suggest the pensive shadow cast on all pleasures when they are framed, theatricalized even, as acts of memory.

  Hodgkin may often be en voyage, but not as a beholder (the Impressionist project). In place of a beholder, there is a rememberer. Both pursuits, that of the traveler and that of the collector, are steeped in elegiac feeling.

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  AFTER THE SHOP HAD CLOSED, The Last Time I Saw Paris, When Did We Go to Morocco?, Goodbye to the Bay of Naples … many titles focus on time (“after”), on the awareness of finalities.

  Art made out of a sense of difference, a sense of triumph, a sense of regret.

  If there are so many pictures which offer homage to the feelings and sensations that Venice inspires, it is because that city is now, as it could never have been for Turner, a quintessential evoker of the sentiment of loss.

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  IT’S NOT THAT the exotic, or the southern, is required to release the impulse of this “northern” sensibility to paint.

  But it may be that this painter needs to travel.

  A trip is an intensifier, license to the avid eye (and other senses). You need the separation from home. And then you need the return home, to consider what you have stored up.

  In principle, the painter could make pictures out of everything he has lived through and done and seen. This creates an unbearably acute pressure to paint, and an equally acute feeling of anxiety.

  Travel, the impression
that one has ventured outside oneself, can be used as a filter and goad. It organizes the desire to paint. It gives it a rhythm, and the right kind of delay.

  It is important not to see too much. (And there is nothing to reproduce.) Hence, Hodgkin doesn’t sketch, doesn’t take photographs, doesn’t do anything obvious to commit to memory the scene or an interior or a view or a face—instead trusting what will happen when the sight of something has burrowed itself deep down in memory, when it has accumulated emotional and pictorial gravity.

  A way of feeling is a way of seeing.

  What is worth painting is what remains in, and is transformed by, memory. And what survives the test of long-term deliberation and countless acts of re-vision. Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions (or layers, or brush strokes); some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of a feeling.

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  LOOKING CLOSELY at what the swipes and plunges of Hodgkin’s brush have deposited on a surface is to feel, sometimes, that one has divined the brush’s itinerary, starting from the first, generative surge of feelings. The distinctive shapes in Hodgkin pictures read like a vocabulary of signals for the circulation, collision, and rerouting of desire.

  Sometimes it feels as if the flooding or brimming has spilled over onto the frame. Sometimes it is the frame that has moved inward, thickened, doubled, as if to contain what cannot be contained. (The fat verticals of Snapshot, like the sides of a proscenium stage ora gate; the thick oval frame of Love Letter that squeezes, crowds the heart of what lies pulsing in the center.)

  Framing hems in, keeps one from falling off the edge of the world. And framing gives permission to emote.

  It makes possible the ambitiousness of Hodgkin’s work, and its tight, cunningly judged compactness of statement. Hodgkin has understood that if the pictures are dense enough, they can go in two directions, doing justice to intimate textures as well as to emotions of a large expressiveness. (Vuillard and opera, so to speak.)

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  VENICE: ONCE, AGAIN. Imagining the imagined. When you want to see Venice again, and you have seen it many times, rising out of the sea, in winter perhaps, semi-deserted, what you appreciate is that it will not have changed at all.

  Or you stand at the railing of the boat going up the Nile, a day’s journey from Luxor, and it’s sunset. You’re just looking. There are no words you are impelled to write down; you don’t make a sketch or take a photograph. You look, and sometimes your eyes feel tired, and you look again, and you feel saturated, and happy, and terribly anxious.

  There is a price to be paid for stubbornly continuing to make love with one’s eyes to these famous tourist-weary old places. For not letting go: of ruined grandeur, of the imperative of bliss. For continuing to work on behalf of, in praise of, beauty. It’s not that one hasn’t noticed that this is an activity which people rather condescend to now.

  Indeed, one might spend a lifetime apologizing for having found so many ways of acceding to ecstasy.

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  THE IDEA IS to put as much as possible, of color, of feeling, in each picture. It’s as if the pictures need their broad border to contain so much feeling. As if they need to be painted on something hard, wood, since they embody such a large sense of vulnerability.

  The sense of vulnerability has not diminished. Nor has the sense of gratitude: for the privilege of feeling, the privilege of voluptuousness, the privilege of knowing more rather than less. There is heroism in the vehemence and the lack of irony of Hodgkin’s pictures. He labors over them as if painting could still be a vehicle of self-transcendence.

  In such matters, with such purposes, the race is to the slow.

  [1995]

  A Lexicon for Available Light

  AVAILABLE LIGHT. 1983. Fifty-five-minute work for eleven dancers (five women and six men) commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: the third of Lucinda Childs’s large-scale productions. Music by John Adams, set by Frank Gehry, costumes by Ronaldus Shamask, lighting by Beverly Emmons.

  BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs’s work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable “effects.” Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal.

  CHOREOGRAPHY. Childs started by defining herself as a “modern” choreographer; therefore, alienated from “tradition.” (Two decades ago, it could still seem plausible to regard modern dance as the antithesis and subversion of classical dance.) When she did start choreographing dances, in 1968, it was with the predilection for keeping the movement vocabulary relatively simple, seeking complexity elsewhere—in the intricate design of spatial forms and of timing. But in the music-based works choreographed since 1979, which propose a much more complex movement vocabulary, Childs has broken radically with the anti-ballet aesthetic of the other ex- or neo-Duchampian choreographers with whom she has been grouped. Of all the adepts of the rigorously modern among contemporary choreographers, she has the subtlest and most fastidious relation to classical dance. If her use of portions of the ballet idiom is less easily recognizable than Merce Cunningham’s and Twyla Tharp’s, it is because Childs does not feed balletic movements and positions into an eclectic mix but wholly transforms and reinterprets them. In this, as in other matters, she is adamantly anti-collage. Thus the choreography of Available Light was not conceived first and then illustrated by the music, the set, and the costumes but solicited, presupposed, and worked out in strict relation to these—to the two-level stage devised by Gehry, the multi-layered music of Adams, the three-color constructivist scheme (black, red, white) of Shamask’s costumes.

  COMPLEXITY. Cunningham in 1952: “For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen is what it is. And I do not believe it is possible to be ‘too simple.’” The delicate rhythms and intricate configurations and tempi of Cunningham’s work, the way attention is commanded through a simple, unadorned, unexplained, often decentered presence, offered a new standard of the complex.

  CUNNINGHAM, MERCE. Childs, who studied with Cunningham between 1959 and 1963, assumes Cunningham’s notion that dance should not express something else (an emotion, a story, an interior landscape) but not Cunningham’s method, which is to make the elements of dance self-contained, autonomous, even aleatoric in their mix (and sometimes in their look). “I didn’t like it,” Cunningham once said, “that a movement meant something.” This liberating stance has been associated with a large element of parody in Cunningham’s idiom: post-Graham movements (the Cunningham curved back is an ironic comment on the Graham contraction) and laterally tilted ballet positions. Out of this eclectic aesthetic, much irony. (Cunningham’s choreography is an art of disjunction and therefore ultimately comic.) Childs by temperament unifies; her aesthetic refuses the eclectic, the disjunctive—it never quotes. Though playfulness is one of her chief standards of grace, her work is virtually free of irony. Its tone is austere but never cool. Embracing the Cunningham position (the refusal of plot, of “meaning”), Childs has drawn other consequences from it; she has dropped the jokes, the kidding around, the wistful lyricism, and reached for the sublime.

  Dance. 1979. The first of the large-scale productions, a hundred-minute work, for the company of nine. Music by Philip Glass, lighting by Beverly Emmons, and a film by Sol LeWitt of portions of three of the five sections (“Dance #I,” “Dance #3,” and “Dance #4”). Choreographers as different as Cunningham and Pina Bausch have made works with an accompanying, simultaneous image-record, displayed on a TV monitor placed on the stage; in contrast to this additive, fragmenting use, the projection of LeWitt’s film, on a transparent scrim at the front of the stage, is a true setting and literal transfiguration of the dance. The synchronized ongoing of film and dance creates a double space—flat (the
scrim/screen) and three-dimensional (the stage)—and provides a double reality, both dance and its shadow (documentation, projection), both intimacy and distance. Recording the dancers from different angles, in long shot and in close-up, LeWitt’s film tracks the dancers, sometimes on the same level, sometimes from above—using split-screen and multiple images. Or it immobilizes them, in a freeze-frame (or series of still shots) which the live dancer passes through. Or it waits with the dancer, as in the beginning of “Dance #4,” Childs’s second solo, when Childs appears both in large mask-like close-up on the scrim and as a small immobile figure in white on the stage. The film is a friendly, intermittent ghost that makes the dancers, seen behind the scrim, seem disembodied, too: each seems the ghost of the other. The spectacle becomes authentically polyvalent, though the film is finally subordinate to the dance. “Dance #2,” Childs’s first solo, and the concluding “Dance #5” proceed without the film ghost.

  DIAGONAL. A signature element in Childs’s choreography: a principle of avidity, about space. Dancers often go into low plié arabesque, with the arm continuing the diagonal—the longest line that the body can make. And they often move on the diagonal—the longest distance one can traverse on a stage without changing direction. Childs’s adventures with the diagonal have their apotheosis in Relative Calm, two of its four sections being choreographed entirely on the diagonal. In the first section, the whole company dances back and forth on parallel paths from upstage right to downstage left for twenty-three increasingly blissful minutes; in the third, solo section, Childs dances for seventeen minutes in phrases of different lengths, punctuated by turns, on the opposite diagonal … And moving to the diagonal often means an intensification, as in the finale of “Dance #1” of Dance, when suddenly four pairs of dancers dash again and again from upstage left to downstage right. Or in Available Light: Childs’s arrival upstage right and slow progress downstage left through a corridor formed by eight dancers, four on each side.