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While the political motivations – artistic and historical – underlying Guston’s late work are significant, there is another, more mythic impulse at work within his shift to figuration. Earlier in his career, Guston had a number of discussions with Morton Feldman about what it would be like to be the final painter of a tradition – what he referred to as “the last painter.” (Krauss 91). The statement suggests the anxiousness of the period, when artists like Rauschenberg and Johns were first challenging Modernism’s monolithic grasp upon the art world. But by the 1960s, Guston’s situation had changed. Exhausted with abstract expressionism and its endless intellectual proselytizing, the painter was searching for a way to instill his work with some unpolluted invention. Consequently, in conversations with Harold Rosenberg, Guston capsized his original statement: “I imagine wanting to paint as a cave man would, when nothing existed before. But at the same time one knows a great deal about the culture of painting…I should like to paint like a man who has never seen a painting, but this man, myself, lives in a world museum.” (Krauss 91) His goal wasn’t to paint in a primitive style, but to compel himself beyond the narrow confines of the art world that controlled his reaction to unforeseen possibilities unsullied by past disciplines. “In this condition of not knowing,” Guston explained, “you arrive not at a state of ignorance but at a state of knowing only the thing you know at the time – and that is what is concrete.” (Storr 60). Guston wanted to give form to this concreteness in his late paintings. At the time when recognizable forms began to emerge from his abstraction, the artist made a reference to the Jewish legend of the Golem. Central to Guston’s work of the 1970s, the legend describes the creation of a living human statue. Molded out of red clay, the Golem was animated by a band of Cabalistic rabbis who sought to emulate the power of god. Attempting to recreate and honor the conception of Adam, the rabbis believed their work to be a devout offering. However, since the holy men acted without divine knowledge, their effigy was inherently flawed. Therefore, the Golem’s creation was seen as a gesture of failed piety resulting in heresy (Delong 49). Allegorically, Guston’s shift to figuration is a parallel rebellion against the formalist boycott upon recognizable imagery. Striving to debunk the myth of pure painting, Guston bemoaned Modernism’s self-critical distillation of form. However, the dilemma facing Guston was not whether it was feasible to portray the human form, but whether such a form, molded from “colored dirt,” could retain the visual bravura and emotional repercussions of an abstract painting. The painting could not only be aesthetically arresting, but also vibrant. Shortly before Guston’s reintroduction of imagery, he commented: “The strongest feeling I have…is that when I leave the studio, I have left there a ‘person,’ or something that is a thing, an organic thing that can lead its own life, that doesn’t need me anymore.” (Storr 60). Nevertheless, Guston’s insistence upon painting as genesis carries the same caveats as the rabbis’ Golem. The clay effigy, both a concrete representation of man’s supremacy and graven proof of his capacity for hubris, embodies man’s binary nature. Guston’s tumultuous shift into figuration came only after a revelatory moment of self-realization – that in order to wield the entirety of his creative power, he would have to face the terrifying possibilities of his own imagination. Recalling an oft-repeated ritual during his bitter struggle with figuration, Guston once said, “People complain that it’s horrifying. As if it’s a picnic for me, who has to…see them first thing. But what’s the alternative? I’m trying to see how much I can stand.” (Roth 68). He played the role of the avantgarde painter in the most literal sense, pushing past tradition and wrestling with his own limits. Meeting of Minds 2006 118
The motivation behind Guston’s return to representation can only be understood in the light of his consuming and career-spanning fascination with the history of art and his quixotic and often combative appropriation of its visual patterns. Describing the artist’s tenebrous relationship with artistic convention, Morton Feldman wrote, “Guston is of the Renaissance. Instead of being allowed to study with Giorgione, he observed it all from the Ghetto… Due to circumstances, he brought that art into the diaspora with him. That is why Guston’s paintings are the most peculiar history lesson we have ever had.” (Storr 93-4). Challenging the increasingly dogmatic schools of abstraction that were predominant during the 1960s and 70s, Guston recapitulated the recognizable image not to destroy what came before but to start anew. He once commented that “to paint is always to start at the beginning again,” and his late style represents an attempt to break the magisterial shackles of Modernism and allow art the freedom to change (Storr 99). Through reintroducing his own creative idiosyncrasies spliced with a palpable sense of historic tradition, Guston defied artistic finality with his sometimes contradictory, often controversial, but always profoundly singular vision. Meeting of Minds 2006 119
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Meeting of Minds XIV Journal of Und
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ABOUT THE MEETING OF MINDS: JOURNAL
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Contribut
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DIFFERENCES IN TEACHING: INNER-CITY
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1995. The teacher believed they are
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In studies of age related declines
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slightly smaller than the incongrue
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Since the requirements of surviving
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Table 2 Observed behaviors of Imara
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Figure 2 Relative frequencies of de
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References Alexander, R. D. “The
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She goes for it. She proves to the
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Hypotheses The current study examin
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Previous fMRI research suggests tha
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[LDL’s] carry cholesterol from th
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for amounts in excess of 0.5 grams.
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Dewey, David L. “Hydrogenated Oil
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These are the tranquillized Fifties
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The reader is thrust out of the mem
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WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING OUT: CO
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What follows is a description of tw
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The ceiling of the church is adorne
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Against the back wall of the church
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Bibliography Bowen, John R. Religio
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(Gough, 1957). Because individuals
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References Bochner, A., di Salvo V.
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It is difficult for many critics, a
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It seems clear that Bishop is not a
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“SHE WAS ONLY A SLIP OF A THING B
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women are strong enough to care for
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had the luxury of doing business
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Chinese students regularly had as m
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The age of the participants ranged
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Table 3 illustrates the results of
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If I was to further this study, I w
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idomain conductivities (σ iL , σ
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Page 75 and 76: THEORETICAL INVESTIGATIONS ON ADSOR
Page 77 and 78: 1T 3T 5T Figure 1: The cluster mode
Page 79 and 80: The N-O bond lengths also show a si
Page 81 and 82: The relative energies of the NO ads
Page 83 and 84: INVESTIGATION OF SUBSTITUTED CYCLOO
Page 85 and 86: were 9 possibilities from the X and
Page 87 and 88: 28 O O RSS NA 8.6 28 O O SSS NA 8.6
Page 89 and 90: As seen from the distance data abov
Page 91 and 92: continually touches her and plays w
Page 93 and 94: In the last scene, Act 5.4, the tra
Page 95 and 96: Tristan was the one who had her bef
Page 97 and 98: Bibliography Béroul. The Romance o
Page 99 and 100: given day one could observe a cheat
Page 101 and 102: Many countries have taken Latin Ame
Page 103 and 104: References and Works Cited Andaló,
Page 105 and 106: differentiates human beings from an
Page 107 and 108: has to beg the wind to help her. Th
Page 109 and 110: APOCALYPSE, WHEN? Joanne Chiu Facul
Page 111 and 112: Lowell’s energetic diction connec
Page 113 and 114: The apocalypse has come and as with
Page 115 and 116: RELIGION AS A MANIPULATIVE TOOL IN
Page 117 and 118: With a sense of his mastery of stra
Page 119 and 120: References Arenal, Electa and Stace
Page 121 and 122: constructed a visual lexicon aggres
Page 123: them as the hoods plot their next t
Page 127 and 128: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: A PARADOX OF
Page 129 and 130: GUNTHER VON HAGEN’S GESTALT PLAST
Page 131 and 132: are borrowed directly from the visu
Page 133 and 134: In general, science museums do not
Page 135 and 136: The report suggests that war-crimes
Page 137 and 138: DATA MINING IN BIOINFORMATICS: USIN
Page 139 and 140: Zealand, which was ranked 77 th in
Page 141 and 142: THE JENSEN LANDSCAPE AT HENRY AND C
Page 143 and 144: number of Boxelder trees increased
Page 145 and 146: Figure 3. The distribution of Sugar
Page 147 and 148: THE EFFECT OF RETINOIDS ON REGENERA
Page 149 and 150: deparaffinized in xylene. After the
Page 151 and 152: A B C Figure 2 Photographs of tadpo
Page 153 and 154: IU/mL retinoids is the best concent
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