Wild Ducks Flying Backward

by Tom Robbins

  The Seattle exhibition made possible a consideration of Louis not usually afforded. The Seattle art community is neither ignorant of the perspicuous formal analyses of Louis made by Greenberg and Fried, nor are we naive enough to believe that in modernistic painting content can exist independently of form. We are, however, at sufficient distance from the citadels of formalist criticism that we may—with comfort—allot more than the usual priority to the experiential aspects of Louis’s work. That Louis was a visionary painter is beyond question. But if he ever spoke of the nature of his philosophical predilections, his friends have been notably reticent on the subject. We might, however, consider several ways in which Louis’s work regularly transcends its own materiality—and even its predominant opticality—to provide experiences which can probably best be described as metaphysical.

  Along with certain paintings by Pollock, Rothko, Reinhardt, and Robert Irwin, Louis’s veils and unfurleds project an “extraterrestrial” presence as opposed to the “sea-level” character of most art. These descriptions are not as eccentric as they would at first appear.

  At sea level, weight and gravity are, for all practical purposes, interchangeable. Likewise, in most painting, weight (a condition of pictorial density usually prescribed by opulence of pigment, fullness of volume, or darkness of value) is also inseparable from gravity (a condition of pictorial force usually prescribed by changes of rhythm, dynamics of contour, or balance of plane—in short, those elements which exert tension upon the picture plane and within the eye of the beholder). In outer space, however, weight and gravity can, and normally do, occur independently of one another.

  From a height of 200 miles, the gravity field in which an astronaut is moving still has ninety percent of its terrestrial value, yet his weight is exactly nothing. The undulation of rivulets in the unfurleds and the lucid interchanges of color configurations in the veils exert a relatively profound gravitational force from which the eye of the observer is never free, yet despite Louis’s scale—partly because of it—the atmospheric posture and subtle balance of tensions in these pictures is such that they seem absolutely weightless.

  Before the veils and unfurleds, the observer experiences the exhilaration man almost always feels when he succeeds in soaring free from the earth—an exhilaration that is particularly sensational but which evokes conditions of consciousness that are essentially spiritual. It is no coincidence that the gods of so many disparate cultures have dwelt in the sky.

  Space in the veils and unfurleds embodies an act of manipulation with obvious supra-optic overtones. In the unfurleds, Louis parted the veils—he removed the huge continuous image which had obscured, however transparently, the center of his canvases. The space subsequently exposed, although blank, proved surprisingly to be neither dull nor dead. It possessed not only color and shape but a spatial presence at least as strong as that of the veils. Such a phenomenon could be analogous to numerous references in mystic literature to the very real substance of that formlessness which exists when form has gone.

  Too, from a certain perspective the unfurleds’ banks of ribbons look to be waves or beams which have been deflected by an area of space of such substance that it is impenetrable. From another perspective the same ribbons seem to be floating like banners in a space that is entirely vaporous.

  In either case, a sense of the void is conveyed with a reality unequaled in all of art. And, as in most Eastern philosophies, it is a void simultaneously full and empty, nothing and everything.

  ARTFORUM, September 1967

  Lost in Translation

  Those Americans familiar with my work (don’t everybody stand up at once) will not be surprised to learn that one of the questions I’m asked most frequently is, “How do your books come across in foreign translations?”

  Well, for readers who are interested in such matters, there’s probably no better answer than the following example.

  First, here are some opening paragraphs from the prologue to my 1984 novel, Jitterbug Perfume.

  The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

  Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

  The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip …

  The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sail of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

  Now, here is a literal back-translation into English of those same sentences as they appear in a version published in the Czech Republic.

  Among all vegetables, the red beet is the most passionate. The radish may be hotter, but her heat soars in the cold flame of anxiety, not passion. Tomatoes may be sufficiently energetic, but then, they are known for their carelessness. The beet is mortally serious.

  The Slavic nations developed their body characteristics thanks to the potatoes, their smoldering restlessness from radishes, and the seriousness from the red beet.

  The red beet is a melancholy vegetable, always prepared to suffer. And from such turnip you can not get any blood…

  The red beet is a murderer who keeps returning to the place of the crime. The red beet predicts what is going to happen when a cherry knocks off the carrot. The red beet is an ancient ancestor of the harvest moon, with beard, buried and fully petrified; of the dark green sails on the lunar boat stitched with elementary plasma; of the kite line which once tied together the Earth and the Moon, to be changed at the end into muddy whisker frantically searching for rubies.

  The reader can now draw his or her own conclusions. Obviously, though, some translations are more precise than others. I’ve been told by bilingual readers that until recently, when the insensitive publisher unduly hurried the translator, I’ve been reproduced in Italian with scant loss of meaning or intent; but that the Mexican Spanish version of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is quite “sleazy,” a description that probably doesn’t displease me as much as it ought.

  Incidentally, Jitterbug Perfume in Czech back-translates into Perfume of the Insane Dance. I’m not sure but that I don’t prefer that title to my own. So, if much is lost in translation, something on rare occasions may also be gained.

  Leo Kenney and the Geometry of Dreaming

  What we have here is a thirty-year record of one man’s search for the Self through art.

  It is that poignant and that personal. And because it is an adventure of the imagination, because for Leo Kenney the process of making visible connections between himself and the rest of the universe has been so very nearly ceremony or rite, because at its best his work does not even have the look of Art, the temptation is strong (especially at this flaccid moment in our cultural history) to deal with the Kenney exhibition in metaphysical rather than aesthetic terms.

  Happily, however, the formal aspects of Kenney’s painting match the measure of his psychological/philosophical quest. If his meditations on mysterious relationships encompass the physical act of applying pigment to paper and, indeed, overtake it, it is still all there before our eyes, all of it, externalized and none the weaker after hard-nosed analysis. The human imagination has always searched for abstract symbols with which to express itself. We need extend our evaluation of Kenney no further than the actual formal means by which he has manifested that search in order to reach a full experiential appreciation of the visionary phenomena that have informed and intuited it.

  First, let us divide Kenney’s lifework thus far into two bodies: that
done prior to 1962 and that executed thereafter. Actually, of course, there are several “periods” represented by the sixty-eight works in this retrospective, but, taking a broad view, it is evident that a sharp stylistic demarcation occurred around 1962, when the artist was thirty-seven, was back at art after a fairly long absence, and was contemplating a return to his native Pacific Northwest from California. Freud stresses in his investigations the passages and difficulties of the first half of the human life cycle—those of our infancy and adolescence. Jung, on the other hand, has emphasized the crises of the second half—when, in order to advance, the sun of our being must submit to setting. Thus, at the risk of oversimplification, we might say that before 1962, Leo Kenney was a Freudian painter, after 1962, Jungian.

  These categories sound less arbitrary when we note that the “Freudian” paintings are decidedly flavored with Surrealism, their subject matter and optical placements a testimony to that teeming, Freud-discovered substratum of consciousness wherein the distinction between the sensory and the intellectual functioning of the mind is erased. The pictures that we shall call “Jungian” employ a much more clarified, accessible, and universal set of symbols, presented in an oceanic atmosphere of radiance and calm.

  Speaking of subject matter, the “Freudian” paintings contain an abundance of it. This is figurative work, on both a literal and symbolic level. The central configuration in The Inception of Magic, the earliest work (1945) in the show, is a human torso, complete with distended womb, through which flow all manner of physical and psychic forces, and which is composed of an orchestrated synthesis of macrocosmic and microcosmic imagery. As late as 1961, in Relic of the Sun, this same torso is dealt with again, although now the emphasis is on volume rather than on line, on archetypal shape rather than on internal energies.

  The representational figures and objects of the “Freudian” period are quite linear. Frequently, Kenney combined ink drawing with water-soluble paints (although there are several fine oils in this show, Kenney is by inclination and reputation a watercolorist and that is how we shall regard him). His line here is precise, intense, as architectural as organic but absolutely throbbing with sensuality. His color is subdued and subordinate, often no more than a tonal exercise in grays.

  These works are literary to the point of being reading rather than visual experiences. Hermetic, romantic, incredibly introspective, they are packed edge to edge with images-within-images, heads dreaming other heads, emotions and thoughts stylized into symbols—in short, they are overloaded with the cerebral speculations, philosophical yearnings, and erotic anxieties of a brilliant young provincial who had rejected all formal education and then proceeded to drink himself giddy on art books, Surrealist and Symbolist poetry, West Coast art museum collections, and the ceremonial trappings of the Catholic Church, which he attended until his early teens.

  Today, such painting is hardly fashionable, and Kenney’s “Freudian” pictures may seem stilted and theatrical. They are, also, extremely moving. Moreover, the loving, even obsessive, attention that he lavished on his enigmatic juxtapositions, his quasi-Renaissance perspectives, his hallucinatory unfoldings and planar undulations often produced pictures of real beauty. In Night Swimmer II, for example, the timing of the various pictorial elements is so exquisite as to transport the viewer beyond considerations of iconography.

  Kenney’s “Freudian” paintings—and in distillation, the later work, too—have an affinity with, if not a debt to, Giorgio de Chirico, Henry Moore, Max Ernst, and the Salvador Dali of the Soft Construction With Boiled Beans persuasion; with Neo-Romanticism and perhaps even Synthetic Cubism. It is best to place him in that sort of international context. While his presence on the doorsteps of Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson, and, especially, Morris Graves was a source of strength and inspiration for him, and while he shares a few of those artists’ general characteristics, it is misleading to see Kenney as a younger but bona fide member of a so-called “Northwest School.” He creates from an intuitive and individual imperative, with ties to many eras and areas of art.

  It is no labor to find evolutionary continuity in Kenney’s work. The forms from the early pictures are echoed in the later, and the artist maintains his philosophical proclivities. But, following a deeply mystical personal experience in 1962, a purification took place. The “Freudian” paintings were stripped of extraneous and overtly figurative imagery; concerns were clarified, simplified, abstracted, and placed in the mainstream of the collective unconscious. In the “Jungian” works, Kenney employs a few simple, ancient geometric devices in variation—most often the circle and the square in that order.

  Of all emblems, the circle or “tondo” is the most soaked with meaning. From dimmest pre-history, it has symbolized the sun, whose power, in one disguise or another, flows through all matter. It represents, too, the seed and the cell, the head, the halo and the corona, bodily orifices, Zodiac wheels, the earth, the eye, and the egg, the unbroken cycle of life and the continuity of consciousness. In Kenney’s hands it alludes unspecifically to all these things, as well as to what Tibetans call the “mysterious golden flower of the soul.” Kenney’s tondos are magic mirrors that objectify subjectives.

  Formally, he puts the circle to more pragmatic uses. Its round shape serves to draw the viewer’s eye inward toward a nucleus where it is confronted either by a more finite system of circles that suggest the viewer must look deeper still, or by spikes, sparks, or effluvia, that especially when deployed concentrically, also push pictorial space outward, heightening the illusion of spatial vastness and placing the internal forms in a more communicative relationship with the framing edges.

  The square, too, has symbolic overtones. Early Chinese used it to represent the world. It also has been glorified as a sacred portal, and its four corners have served as visual metaphors for air, earth, fire, and water. To Kenney, the square functions chiefly as a container. It limits and directs the emanations of the circles (thereby playing the dominant, or male, role to the circle’s passive, or female, role). It also helps to balance Kenney’s compositions, allowing them to be read, on one level, as studies in symmetry. The plastic dialogue between squares and circles (and occasional rectangles and ellipsoids) is responsible for the dynamic theater of tensions which dominates everything in Kenney’s pictures, even the symmetry.

  This pictorial drama reflects an actual drama that is unfolding somewhere “out there” or “in here,” but the nature of the drama cannot be specifically identified. It is either too macrocosmic or too microcosmic for the mind’s eye to bring completely into focus. Kenney is a purveyor of ambiguities, paradoxes, and dualities—all in the service of giving geometric form to the mysterious relationships that exist between everything in the cosmos.

  Simultaneously, with the beginning of the “Jungian” period, we have the emergence of Kenney as a masterful and innovative colorist. And the surprise, here, is that while his forms have become more universal, his blossoming palette is uniquely personal.

  Neither organic nor synthetic, his colors come entirely from his imagination. While some of our best contemporary painters force us into an encounter with pure color, Kenney’s color seduces us into an encounter with Kenney. Instead of optical dazzle, he offers us subjective illuminations. Although his use of color is far from primitive, it seems innocent and true.

  Kenney is a tonal painter. In any one picture, you may find an economy of colors but an extravagance of tones. In a subtle and harmonious way, these tones modify, inflect, inspire, and cancel each other to the point where we do not readily distinguish individual generic colors but rather experience a vast aura of tones in constant, orchestral modulation of each other. This is true even though there frequently are large areas to which only a single tone has been applied. Kenney’s “total color” effect is, therefore, not so much the result of a profusion of closely juxtaposed values as it is the result of a carefully controlled overall radiance. His colors intermingle in the way that gases do; they interact as vapor
interacts with light.

  Kenney’s primary medium is gouache, a water-soluble pigment which he applies to dampened paper. This technique gives a soft, spreading, almost blurry effect but one which is nonetheless opaque. Such interchangeability of surface qualities—on the one hand translucent and evanescent, on the other, absorbent and dense—creates an illusion of both concreteness and great depth. And despite the softness of the medium, Kenney’s range is such that he can intensify colors to the point where they seem fluorescent.

  Observe these paradoxes: Kenney’s color is soft yet intense; his color is cool yet it glows as if afire; it is water-based yet it is alkaline dry; it is rigorous yet it is highly sensual and sometimes very nearly sweet.

  While he can—and does—use greens, browns, and yellows, Kenney’s favored hues are reds and blues. What kind of reds and blues? Mixtures of amaranth and orchid, grape and starfish, electricity and high blood pressure. They are like hues perceived through telescopes or microscopes; the colors of sunspots, novae, ionized auroras, and Saturnian rings; of arteries, nerve filaments, viruses, and reproductive cells. In their ambiguity, Kenney’s colors are both intimate and alien. They inspire unconscious connections between entities as close as our own vital organs and as distant as the farthest stars.

  This retrospective is far from a finalized statement. At forty-eight, Kenney is alive and well—and hinting at new directions. Consider Lake Gemma, a recent work. In it, the artist turns his attentions to the parallelogram and the effect is as if Josef Albers had emerged, at long last, from the dusty drafting rooms of the Bauhaus to be suddenly bowled over by nocturnal raptures: the quadrilateral becomes poetically charged, bearing witness to the interdependence of spirit and matter, in nature and art. And bearing witness to Kenney’s visual resourcefulness as he persists in his search for Self, which is to say, for higher consciousness.