neil mulholland - philip guston

8/14/2019 Neil Mulholland - Philip Guston

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Philip Guston, Royal Academy of Art, London

Philip Gustons paintings have enjoyed many a retrospective since his death in 1980, so its nosurprise to find them being dusted down for an appearance at the Royal Academy. Guston was

sure to be a big pull with the paint-starved throng there to see an accompanying Edouard

Villiards exhibition. Revivals of figurative painting have been announced weekly since Gustonsdeparture from his signature lyrical abstraction in his Marlborough show in 1970 caused fervour

among New York formalists. This moment of departure features heavily in discussions of

Gustons work. For all the talk of restlessness and stylistic provocation in Gustons oeuvre itsrelatively easy to trace some consistency in Gustons practice, (notwithstanding the fact the

lacklustre chronological hang at the RA makes this more difficult than it ought to be.)

In his early works of the 1930s Guston can be seen experimenting with a range of subject

matter, from the academic to the overtly political. The lumbering Mother and Child(1930), aprecocious cubo-surrealist melange painted when he was just seventeen, jostles for attention

alongside a number of paintings that borrow heavily on the subject matter and technique of

Mexican muralism. A series of paintings from the late 1950s reveal Guston under going the kind

of road to Damascus style conversion that can be traced in the work of many abstract painters inthe 20th century, a gradual process of decomposition and slow shift towards combative rectilinear

forms. These arent bad paintings but they arent particularly remarkable. The Royal Academyexhibits more than a fair share of Gustons 60s abstract impressionist paintings. They are subtle

but seeing so many together detracts from their uniqueness, rendering them a mass of

undifferentiated struggles. Guston famously said that he got bored with all this purity. His

abstract paintingFor Mis anything other than pure. Wise and gruff, its torn between the goodtaste of post-painterly abstraction and the chaotic tension of Jackson Pollocks all over works.

These paintings clearly carry the same anxious palette of pinks and blacks and harbour more than

a hint of the cartoon-like handling of his later paintings. They also carry a very ambiguous senseof space, having much in common with Vuilliards intimism and Gaston Bachelards

phenomenological theories of spatial poetics. The claustrophobic quality remains in his laterwork.The notion that Guston returned to telling stories about real life is difficult to

substantiate wholly. Certainly, the paintings made after 1969 appear to be a wholesale rejection of

his earlier formalist paintings, the deliberately trashy quality of his handling serving tounderscore this. At the same time, however, Guston continued to work very much within the

frame and on the surface. His Ku Klux Klansmen are trapped in the two-dimensional world of the

painted canvas, a world of world of their own making, one in which objects such as paint

palettes, light bulbs and brushes carry literal rather than symbolic value. They are there simply torepresent the tools and labour involved in making a painting. The paintings are fantastically

matter-of-fact, exaggerating the underlying index of value in post-painterly abstraction and

minimalism without opting for any of the obvious acts of parody so ubiquitous in post-minimalism. In this sense, the Klansmen paintings works are ciphers of an American thoroughly

in thrall of secular materialism they are post-expressionist, post-minimal and post-human.

One of the highlights of the exhibition TheStudio (1969) shows a hooded figure smokingwhile narcissistically painting a self portrait. We cant see the figures eyes and therefore arent

being encouraged to read the figure reactively, its a disembodied being, a husk not a hero. The

clock only has one hand, which points to 2:00. We have no indication of whether its day or night;

perhaps the painter doesnt want to know about whats happening outside the world he has


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constructed for himself. Smoking is futile, it doesnt provide sustenance but it is pleasurable

perhaps for this reason. Making art seems to be the same thing in this painting, it doesnt really

help matters or mean that much, it just happens to one way of passing the time. The picture ischoked in paint, suffocating under the weight of its stodgy facture. Far from telling a story, this

painting mourns the loss of subject matter, the ability to use painting meaningfully. The artist is

represented as a coward, someone who isnt merely prejudiced (the Klansmen are zealousfascists) but ashamed of admitting their prejudices in public. The artist hides behind a mask.

Guston never really got over the vacuousness of abstraction.

Although drinking and drug-taking have a long and illustrious history in art, drunkennessis seldom represented in non-mythological terms. Guston scorns Bacchus for something more

homespun and deadpan. The emptiness seems to lie in the paintings of large monocular heads

such asHead and Bottle, a stubbled brute staring at an empty bottle of booze. This is a portrait of

an artist - as Martin Kippenberger might have put it - buggered for ideas. Like Kippenberger,Guston turns what might be seen as failing into something worthwhile, inadequacy is celebrated

bestowed with comic transcendence. Despite representing the a mind and body stagnant from

alcohol, its by far one of his most expressive works. It really looks droggy grog, has the furry

mouthed mono focus of a pissed-up session, finding it a headache to stare so hard, and forgettingwhy it was trying to concentrate. The head exudes failed megalomania: the biggest mouth, the

biggest eye, the biggest hair, the product of a colossal dilettantism that has failed miserably.Guston retained this uncanny knack of pulling off weighty subject matter in an urchin-looking

living room style in a large number of paintings. The knots of legs and tackety boots might be

mass graves, a mass march, or a mass orgy, Guston doesnt let on. Hes not painting the soul, but

he is painting soles. The comedy undermines the high seriousness of Abstract art, and in so doing,helps to get across the idea that painting cant win any battles.

Guston isnt alone in his no-nonsense mock heroism. In many ways, his nice-with-a-touch

of-nasty canvases served either as a talismans or benchmark for post-conceptual painters in the70s and 80s such as Terry Atkinson, Malcolm Morley, David Salle and Julian Schnabel, all

concerned, in one way or another, with a deconstructive approach to narrative painting. Gustons

work became appreciated by the painters who emerged in the late 70s and early 80s for havingcreated a space for something less cerebral and more playful than the University Art that

seemed to have been around for a decade. The New Museum of Contemporary Arts BadPaintingshow in 1978 andNew Image Paintingat the Whitney in 1979 as well asgroundbreaking new wave shows such as the Times Square Show in 1980 were all very heavily

indebted to Gustons grungy nihilism. Its surprising that this is so readily forgotten in most

histories of early 80s art, rife as they generally are with the customary accusations of market

driven neo-conservatism. This view is only beginning to be challenged by art historians such asAlison Pearlman who argues that the style wars of the 80s were over before they were begun.

The binaries of 1980s criticism Expressionism versus Conceptualism, eclecticism versus

appropriation were no longer palpable to artists.1 Guston seems to have recognised somethingsimilar in 1970, that the binaries between avant-garde and kitsch or abstraction and figuration

established by formalist critics were utterly meaningless.

Recognising that art was inherently impure, Guston wasnt afraid to romanticise. Some ofhis later paintings are disarmingly sentimental. Source (1976) is a particularly good example, a

1 Alison Pearlman, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p31.


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painting of Gustons wife, her eyes only just peeking above the bed covers. Her eyes look up

towards the ceiling, and her head is encircled by a green pillow which doubles as a halo. There is

also a strong sense that Guston never abandoned the politics that he inherited during his stint asone of many muralists kept afloat by the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, obvious when

comparing his Klansmen of the 30s and 70s but equally marked in his scathing caricatures of

Richard Nixon, complete with phallic nose and bloodshot eyes. The Nixon paintings aside,Gustons work looks like it was made next week. It inflames the rogue in the bosom by making it

all right to fail gloriously.

Neil Mulholland

neil mulholland - philip guston

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