SMALL APPURTENANCES - UPDATED 11/19/05

MARK TANSEY - INTO THE BLUE

“Archaic smile - n : An expression that resembles a smile and is characteristic of early Greek sculpture”(1)

“Appurtenance - n : An incidental right (as right-of-way) attached to a principal property right and passing in possession with it 2 : A subordinate path of or adjunct < the ~ welcome is fashion and ceremony --Shak. > 3 pl : Accessory objects : APPARATUS”(2)

Mark Tansey @ Gagosian Gallery (New York, New York), November 6 through December 18, 2004

CRITIQUE - Mark Tansey’s ultramarine series stretches things further -- things he first investigated (embedded and privileged) in his seminal paintings from the late 1980s exposing the volatility of the post-modern worldview, a worldview underwritten (suffused) with a possible-impossible, aching ‘endlessness’ and circularity (an archaic smile); a synoptic overview of the ravages of deconstructivism (a form of post-modernism after all) and the post-structuralist anti-project, both signs of that pre-eminent time (the tumultuous 1980s) and the ‘setting of the sign’, or the so-called end(game) of Modernity, plus the attendant-contentious arrival of a de-centered, radical sallying-forth into and toward someplace else altogether.

This somewhere else (a some-thing else) has turned out, as then suspected, to be a deferred Romanticism, insofar as Romanticism is yet suspect terrain, and insofar as the post-Romantic stain (the hapless, nihilist fear of the ‘knee-deep abyss’) compounds the artistic neurosis that inhabits the field of modern art from Surrealism through Abstract Expressionism to the stillborn quiescence of various minimalisms and post-minimalisms during and after the various artistic insurrections of the 1960s. Thus, Tansey’s recent work contains that essentialist quest now bracketed, while at the same moment it gestures toward the ultimate state of things (the mad, fluctuating heart of matter and memory, signs and representational systems) by way of a suggestive tour of seemingly deranged landscapes (on very large canvases) depicting metempsychosis, anamorphosis, and semiosis as a vast complex of irreducible and elemental processes (figural tropes and anti-tropes) informing the cultural-intellectual-aesthetic tableau vivant that is life itself. Liminal landscapes, then, haunted by cultural detritus -- or, apparent things composed of other things, representations only apparently gone off the rails, yet productive of a type of cultural vertigo that does not so much induce a psychic implosion as a radically finite tear in things revealing other things.

Thus Karl Marx’s head as snowball, en route to becoming a snowman, rolled across a wintry landscape, snowguns blazing, trees plastered white, a pair of crossed skis forming eyes and brow, the composite image forming a ‘wintry eye’. Or James Joyce’s face stretched sidewise, lost in the wake of a passing Styxian ferry, crossing the upper-middle picture plane, while a party of merry-making, 1920-somethings (bon vivants) drink (ignoring Chiron and the passing ferry), inhabiting the far left, lower corner of the watery-blue canvas, hung out over the precipice of the painting’s anaesthetic abyss (with soccer ball floating by).(3) Elsewhere, through another blue window, an arctic expedition trudges into the snow-glazed haze of a monstrous, mountainous ‘landscape’, Nietzsche’s upside-down, distended profile darkening the frozen, bleak nothingness, smaller heads dotting the mountain peaks -- an arctic pantheon -- while Wittgenstein’s head slices diagonally, also upside down, pulled from chin to crown by invisible forces, vanishing into darkening crevices (the cracked, ultramarine fissures of the middle ground).

In other words, picture-making as echo-less vortex … A severe silence falls over the ‘wintry’ carnivale (cavalcade) of ideas lost and found, represented and double- or triple- torqued (upwards, sideways, backwards) -- and thus, over all, a topologically twisted and distended aesthetic vision emerges picturing what Jean-Luc Marion has called the stigmata of the invisible, portraying landscapes as haunted (fecund) fields recalling the ultimate secret that landscape signals a language of deferred signs (memories), whether or not one cares to pay attention (remember).(4) In the warped and dizzying gaps between what is nominally at hand (here) and what is secreted in all things, or putatively ‘singular’ (over there, so to speak), what passes as thought may also be found (always as supplement) as finite, material artifacts -- that is to say, matter locked into time and engraved or etched into memory, painted into place with precision by hand and/or eye. Thus the (im)material/immemorial (unforgettable) force of ideas comes ‘home’ in purely tectonic works from Michelangelo to Donald Judd (the trajectory of Modernity?), yet also in works of literature, philosophy, and painting (or, in aesthetic vision per se).

As most everyone else speaks louder and louder to say less and less, most especially the blue-jowled, cell-phone-chewing ‘public’ (a useless abstraction at best, today), Tansey begs off, and backs off, into the ethereal-blue nether regions where souls travel to and fro, forward and backward in time, biding time and perhaps carving Time itself out of a provisional nothingness in the process.

GK/LANY (New York, 12/06/04, Re-edited 03/07/06)

ENDNOTES

1 - Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam & Co., 1975), p. 59
2 - Ibid., p. 56
3 - Mark Tansey, “Wake” (2003), Oil on canvas, 85 ½” x 96”
4 - Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) 

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mark Tansey, Roland Möning, Mark Tansey (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2005) - Cloth, 84 pages, ISBN: 3-938-02511-5 - Includes the ultramarine series …
Mark C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) - Paper, 151 pages, ISBN 0-226-79129-7
Patterson Sims, Mark Tansey: Art and Source (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1990) - Paper, 40 pages, ISBN 0-932-21636-6
Judi Freeman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Mark Tansey, Mark Tansey (San Francisco: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Chronicle Books, 1993) - Paper, 116 pages, ISBN: 0-811-80468-2
Patrice Loubier, “Elegies du sens: Les allegories de Mark Tansey au cre modernisme”, Parachute 91 (July/September 1998), pp. 11-13
Miles Unger, “Mark Tansey”, New Art Examiner 22 (September 1994), p. 46 - Critique of the Tansey exhibition (w/ reference to “The Enunciation”) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 
Tansey @ Gagosian/New York (Images) - http://www.gagosian.com

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