"SPLASH" BY MARKUES
“Art is brains in the sense of permutations explored systematically, the right complications salted in will be Genius. Genius is the scales and choosing. For anything can be wove into lace, the clap of a hand, a man shaving his face after he comes home from work rather than before, shaving away the fine young hairs, palping his face as he shaves it smooth as a penis, he is getting ready for sex tonight. If he doesn’t stop shaving, he will be late. His razor yearns to warn him by flying from his hand with a soft clap of wings like a bat. But it is a safety razor, designed to stay frozen with fear of giving up its object nature.”—Irving Rosenthal, Sheeper, 1967Writing about the artistic oeuvre of Daniel Lergon, retaining its vibrancy and immanent diversity, and not assigning it to oldish or oversimplifying categories, requires a language that abandons modalities of control and terms such as “painting,” “gesture,” and “freedom.” In order to feel the work, these terms and modalities make precisely what they want to denote seem dated and musty. Rather than another infusion of modernist discourse about painting, I propose a perspective that makes his art fall into the water in a bathroom sink like a razor and observes the water droplets spurting out on all sides individually; the way light refracts in them, before they become one with the surface of the water again or hit the floor or the edge of the sink. My analytical instrument is a rubber duck that floats around in the aforementioned sink between stubbles and remains of lather. I observe and enquire about the gaps, deviations, and possibilities that lie in Daniel’s practice, with its various levels of performance. It becomes apparent—and this makes Daniel’s work contemporary and relevant—that they reside within the art world, while simultaneously making its expectations of availability and control futile.
When I try to describe Daniel Lergon’s works without bracketed concepts such as “abstract painting,” it becomes evident that they can rather be distinguished by forms of withholding information, by insufficient reproducibility and hesitant, inchoate perceptibility. Though Daniel integrates so many physics-related references in his artistic output and organizes his works in series based on materials, he barely discusses his production, if at all. I propose examining this rhetoric of frugal clarity by surveying his artistic strategies beyond medium specificity and material immanence. What is therefore at stake is a “seeing-more” in what apparently looks like abstract painting.
Apart from the artsy gallery CV, no public information about the artist’s personal background is available. I do not want to speculate about the motivation for this or make assertions about his art that are logically derived from his biography—it suffices to say that he is a quite controlled guy. And this guy provides no information, eluding the context mill’s obligation to talk; he does not want to allow anything to become inscribed. The brusque feminist in me thinks that, despite his silence, these works still can be read as part of the world with its diversely gendered distortions. The campy diva in me can still cast a museologizing side-eye and think: what an endangered species. And, as a matter of fact: Daniel is a white, heterosexual, cis man, and he still works alone in his studio—the perfect breeding ground for male autism.1 The art that Daniel produces is therefore also outstandingly suitable as a projection screen for anger at bourgeois cultural ideologies.
It would be, however, both too convenient and hasty to further lambast the stream of Daniel’s production (though it would be fun), to tenderly or even affectionately massage a sentence such as “meditation not ejaculation” into it (though it would be fun), or to tart it up as an emporium of gestural painting with an intellectual grandeur. What interests me instead is understanding the stillness of remaining silent not as bourgeois understatement, but rather as an assertion in and with art that cannot be made with words. When Daniel says that he does not possess an “authority of meaning” for his works and weaves the comprehensibility of his references into the pictures with an invisible thread of “I know that no one else sees this,” both a self-understanding and a gap arise that deserve closer examination. Indeed, what is present there is not an outsourcing of meaning to the works themselves, which would only transform them into metaphysical right-of-way signs. It is also not an expectation that demotes viewers to devices for reading the intention of the artist. What opens up there, apart from an intended meaning and beyond any speech-based comfort zone of interpretations, is a chance not to hear or to read, but to see the inexpressibly fluid.
To facilitate such seeing, what is required is an arrangement of working conditions as well as a lack of virtually automated language—as is all too frequently familiar from press texts, cliché-ridden interviews, or “inspiring conversations,”—to aid this flow of production. The individual works seem less interesting than the flow from which they arise and that is concealed behind a shared “untitled.” A process of experiment-like material research that erects an almost frozen arrangement around the spanned fabric precedes the groups of works. The question that arises in addition is: “What can be found in this backroom of undocumented alchemy?” Scrubbing brushes? Ostrich feather dusters? Raffia skirts? In the oxidation pictures, for example, how the metallic powder reacts with acidified water is tested in various dilutions. Whatever the case, a specific painting instrument is used for each series and a large number of pictures are discarded. Trial and error, testing, discarding; the only correction is rejection, since any too-much weighs down and becomes bogged down in itself. As specific as the selections and preparations might be, they remain detached from the way the results are processed further. It is a laboratory without determination; the gestures become its inexpressible hypotheses, which continue through the various series and materials. The research is conducted by abandoning geometry and the sublime—gestures and physics gossip remain in a state of mutual destabilization—too particulate, too unfixed to coalesce into a big-headed dialectic or a tautology such as “what you see is what you see.” Stated flippantly, when I look through the lens of physics I merely see something that has been spurted out, but when I look through the lens of the gestural I no longer see the phenomena of the inanimate environment—the gestures would question and the materials would give no reply.
A “sinking-into” in the sense of immersing or losing oneself in the surfaces holds dangers, since in this also sparkles the knife of Valerie Solanas and the razor of Sheeper. One possibility lies in an “opening-of”—Daniel’s oeuvre opens up an unfilled emptiness. This emptiness does not refer to a conceptual space in which autonomy is understood as being detached from concepts and from the world, but, instead, facilitates an again-and-again, limitlessly possible opportunity for viewers to refer to the oeuvre. In my opinion, these relationalities are not denied, suppressed, or appropriated, but rather merely remain unarticulated and therefore land neither in a “contentism” that wants to specify interpretation nor in a misunderstanding of aesthetic autonomy. The references become innumerable and flood the mythical location of the intention of a work with permutations and complications. They withstand the context-tsunami of individuals, and, in turn, require this irreconcilability of “free” painting, strict physical references, and silence.
These missing connections subsist as well in the form and materiality of the works as longed-for specification and conventions. The form of the works seems conservative, often lingering on the border of formalism: fabric spanned perfectly on a stretcher frame and executed with paint and masterful grandiloquence. They do not, however, confront viewers in a professional, overwhelming way, but instead show a nonthreatening fragility in the choice of materials and colors, and do not frighten with content or dimensions. Daniel neither retreats to the secure harbor of the neutrality of the color theories that have been constructed over the centuries, nor does he propose an individual, mythological semantics of color or an essentialism dressed up in anthroposophy; so, no Goethe, no Rothko, no Jarman, no Stockmar. The works on retroreflective fabrics do not refer back to a category of naturalness in any way. The fabrics are situated temporally and socially in the now; associations develop along a shared horizon of safety vests, school satchels, and sneakers. The transparent lacquer with which they are treated does not plunge them into alchemical debates about their own production. It prevents the glass beads worked into the fabric from reflecting their own white-gray coloring; it refracts light in front of the eyes of viewers like a melted lens and gives the full spectrum of the rainbow back to the supposedly monochrome paintings.
In the art market system of production-reproduction-distribution, his pictures are not unlike the goods of a gallery, which can be stored in boxes, shipped around the world, and hung in museums, banks, living rooms, and hotels. This expected conformity with the demands of the market invokes photographic reproducibility and enduring temporality. But, as already indicated at the start, Daniel’s works cannot be grasped in this way, or only inadequately. The character of the retroreflective fabric changes its appearance depending on the incidence of light—a frontal, optimal photograph under conditions of reprography cannot capture their sparkle. Daniel’s working color space is larger than the standard of CMYK in printing or RGB on the screen. He therefore refers to this technical reductionism and also to the psychosocial space that surrounds his works as well.
In their variety, the works open up the art world at places that are otherwise filled with obtuse agreements without lapsing into antagonism. They succeed in simultaneously withdrawing and remaining turned toward this world. Perhaps they look fresh because they address viewers’ own conceptual vocabularies, with all their scattered thoughts, instead of an ideologically unquestioned idea of abstract painting and do not fill the fluid void or replace the absence of interpretation. It is possibly this broadmindedness that one beholds in them at first sight. And there is no need to ask whether Daniel thinks all of this himself—what is more important is that he does not prevent it.
Markues, 2015
Notes
1 Valerie Solanas angrily and precisely describes the solipsism that simultaneously structured the production and the reception of art until at least the end of modernism: “We know that ‘Great Art’ is great because male authorities have told us so, and we can’t claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciated the slop they appreciate. / Appreciating is the sole diversion of the ‘cultivated’; passive and incompetent, lacking imagination and wit, they must try to make do with that; unable to create their own diversions, to create a little world on their own, to affect in the smallest way their environments, they must accept what’s given; unable to create or relate, they spectate. Absorbing ‘culture’ is a desperate, frantic attempt to groove in an ungroovy world, to escape the horror of a sterile, mindless, existence. ‘Culture’ provides a sop to the egos of the incompetent, a means of rationalizing passive spectating; they can pride themselves on their ability to appreciate the ‘finer’ things, to see a jewel where this is only turd (they want to be admired for admiring). Lacking faith in their ability to change anything, resigned to the status quo, they have to see beauty in turds because, so far as they can see, turds are all they’ll ever have.”—Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 1968