A Simple Country Painter

Peter Plagens

A lecture at University of Southern California, Gin D. Wong Auditorium, Thursday, February 10, 2005.

In one sense, the title of this talk is meant ironically. I'm not a "simple country painter" in the literal sense. I'm not somebody lives out in the boonies, paints landscapes in oil just for the sheer pleasure of it, and gives them away to family and friends. I'm a fellow who lives in a big city, reads a lot of books, has a lot of hifalutin ideas, and thinks that they somehow manage to seep into his paintings, which I try to sell for what most people would consider outrageous prices.

In another sense, though, I mean the title sincerely. Compared to installation art or most video art--which get the lion's share of attention in the contemporary art world these days--painting is a pretty simple enterprise. At a lecture I went to as a student, Robert Motherwell described painting as defacing a piece of cloth tacked onto some boards by means of colored grease applied with sticks with hairs tied onto the ends. And my own painting--abstract, substantially made up as it goes along, and each painting made in a matter of weeks rather than months or years--is a comparatively simple kind of painting. A couple years ago, my wife and I bought a house in the country--in the Catskill Mountains a couple of hours' drive from New York City--and built a studio into an outbuilding on the property. We try to spend about half our time there, year-round, so that makes me at least partly a "country painter."

Finally, though, there's another irony in the title. "Simple" is another word for "dumb." The French word for "dumb" is bete, and the French have an expression, bete comme un peintre--"dumb as a painter." I don't think that the French literally think that painters have lower IQ's than, say, farmers or bank clerks, but they do think that painters are obstinately impractical in spending a lot of time and money on a useless hobby, especially if their spouses and children suffer from their impracticality.

If I've been anything in the forty or so years I've been (at least on my income tax returns) a professional painter, I've been pretty practical. For instance, I've always--always--had a job or the equivalent in a grant or a fellowship. I don't mean just while I've been a painter, either. When I was fifteen years old, I was fired from my first job as an after-school stock boy at the Studio Silk Shop on Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz. Given that my father was fired from a lot of jobs throughout my childhood, it traumatized me. I can't say that I "vowed" never to be fired again, but I've acted that way ever since. This is not a boast. It's rather a confession that says that I've never quite had the guts to live totally freelance, totally by my wits, without the security of a job.

I'm also practical in lots of small, everyday, neurotic ways. I make lists of things to do, and follow them. Lately, my pocket calendar doesn't seem adequate, so I've taken to making out a list on a new three-by-five card every two or three days. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to cross an item off the list. The items even include things like "studio," which simply means go to the studio that day and paint. I also never quit working--albeit sometimes at a highly distracted and halting pace. This is not a boast, either. It means I can't ever really let go, take a few days off and have some unselfconscious fun. But it's not a confession, either. I once ran into the art dealer Irving Blum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he'd just decided, his wife's warm-weather wishes to the contrary, that he just couldn't live there. Why not? I asked. "Because there's no sense of urgency here," he said. Like many artists who don't exactly have a waiting list of clients, I need a sense of urgency, no matter how self-generated and fictitious, in order to keep going.

A lot of artists like to say that the art they make is an end in itself, that they make art only for meditative self-knowledge, or for an avenue into subjective, personal universes, or for the sheer pleasure it gives them. That's all well and good, but if those are the only reasons an artist has for making art, or if those reasons stand as an excuse to recuse the artist from the raucous, fame- and money-driven, and often corrupt real world of exhibiting and selling his or her art, then what prevents the art from being mere art therapy, or a fun hobby? As my mother used to say, "You gotta get out among 'em." Or, as a wonderful woman named Sarah Pettit, who used to be my merciless editor--as in my boss--for a couple of years at Newsweek before she died of cancer at age 36, used to say, "You've got to be in the shit."

On the other hand, artists aren't just custom jewelers, either, simply making "baubles for the rich." I first read the phrase "baubles for the rich" used in the 1970s as a put-down of the shiny, perfectly crafted "L.A. Look" art of Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Ken Price and others, as though more ragged painting and sculpture was somehow sold to poor people. Oh, all of us artists do make "baubles for the rich," or at least the well-off. Who else has $5,000 to $5,000,000 in discretionary income sitting around to spend on objects to hang on a wall or sit on a floor, or, if the collector's taste runs to installation and video art, to spend on remodeling a whole new room to house the work of art? But I said that artists aren't simply making baubles for the rich. We make baubles which satisfy one of those inner needs I mentioned previously, and which meet certain quirky, personal esthetic criteria for doing so.

To put it perfectly bluntly, I want somebody who's a lot better off financially than I am to buy my paintings and help me earn a living. But the painting I want them to buy is made on spec, according to my own quirky criteria for what's good-looking, to satisfy a complicated agenda of psychological, philosophical and art-historical conceits. If the collector buys into the good-looking part, that's enough for me. If they buy into the other parts of my agenda, that's a bonus. But anything beyond the looks of the painting is my problem.

Obviously, there's a bit of a balancing act--between holing up in the studio like a celibate monk in a grotto, and walking the streets like a hooker--going on here. The hard part is that a middle path of half-monk, half-hooker, isn't a solution. You'll likely end up with the worst of both worlds--no worldly success but no integrity, either--instead of the best--moneyed collectors beating a path to your grotto so that you can choose to deal only with the ones who accept you for what you are, a genius without equal.

What's the answer? I don't know. I do know at this late stage of my career, however, that the answer isn't contained in some kind of slogan, or inspirational sentence, or set of rules to follow, or even contained in some anecdote. Obviously, the artist's dilemma is just a specific instance of an age-old choice of how much to ask for your birthright when you sell it for a mess of pottage, what to render unto Caesar and what to render unto God, and how much of the world do you want to gain in exchange for how much of your soul. And, since you're an artist and not a celibate monk in a grotto, you can't just forego the world entirely and keep your soul perfectly intact. If you do that, then you're a soul fetishist, someone who's more interested in being self-righteously pure and untainted by commerce, than you are in being dangerously "in the shit."

One more note about choosing to be "in the shit." I think it's an artist's duty because any artist other than one of those self-taught Adolf Wolfli types from some asylum in Switzerland has learned something, imitated something, or stolen something from some artist who endured the slings and arrows of participating in the art world. When I was an undergraduate, one of the graduate students had a bumper sticker printed that said, Jackson Pollock died for your sins. Hans Memling, George Bellows, Richard Diebenkorn, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning and Sidney Nolan died for mine, and it would have been the height of ingratitude to them had I not at least tried to get my stuff out there, too, to suffer whatever critical and commercial fate lay in store.

Now, these days it's deceptively easy to think of yourself as having "integrity," and of participating in the art world for all the right reason simply because you're a painter. A lot of painters I know have a martyr complex, and think that there's a kind of conspiracy against painting; they like to sit around and piss and moan about how the art world has gone to hell in a handbasket and how it was so much better back in 1912 or 1936 or 1950 or even during the 1980s.

There's no conspiracy. Modern art, in becoming contemporary art, has simply been hoisted on its own petard. That petard is originality or its more common form, mere novelty. The contemporary art audience wants novelty and contemporary artists want to make art that's considered novel. Most artists like to think that their urge to be original comes first, and that the audience simply follows along at a lag time of somewhere between three months and ten years. That may have been true in 1912 or even 1950, but as long ago as 1964--when I got out of graduate school--the game was up. We knew that there was an audience out there, we just didn't think of it as an audience. We thought it was a kind of select, semi-secret society consisting of our favorite critics, a few bigtime collectors like Richard Brown Baker, Burton Tremaine and Robert Scull, and an occasional new initiate, such as a friend or family member with enough money and pity to buy something we made. Anyway, the audience that wants originality or novelty or doesn't know the difference, has moved on from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and Minimalism to post-Minimalism to neo-Expressionism and neo-Conceptualism, and now wants a novelty that 99.9% of painting cannot provide.

To most of the audience for contemporary art, painting, especially abstract painting, seems like "been there, done that." The rebuttal of, "Well, you haven't been quite there where my painting is at, and done quite what my painting is about" seems nit-picky and weak compared to, say, photographs of a big hulking artist throwing other people into bushes or a video of an artist having sex with a collector in a hotel room. Also, notice how the phrase "abstract painting" doesn't quicken your pulse like "throwing other people into bushes" or "having sex in a hotel room" do.

We live in an age of branding and catch-phrases. Even the war in Iraq is branded by the television news networks, each with its own graphically designed catch-phrase. Abstract painting doesn't lend itself to branding or catch-phrases (and if it ever did, the brands and catch-phrases have been heard before). But other kinds of art like having yourself photographed throwing people into bushes and having yourself videoed having sex with a collector do. That's not a conspiracy; that's just the audience's appetite for novelty--OK, originality if you want--being satisfied. That's the way things are. We painters will just have to deal with it, as the kids say.

Personally, I have a couple of metaphors that help me deal with the status and predicament of abstract painting today. One is about nations and empires, the other is about music. Among the nations of the arts, painting (long before there was modern abstract painting) was something like the British Empire: it covered more territory than any of the other arts (indeed, the sun never set on it), and it more or less ruled the waves. In the 20th century, it was kind of like America--not an empire, but certainly the biggest superpower. Now its role is diminished--it still holds its seat on the United Nations Security Council, so to speak, only by dint of its past power, which is now a little hollow. So painting is, say, Spain. (I know: Spain is not on the Security Council; but I don't want to use France as my example.) Not an empire, not a superpower, but a perfectly noble and respectable country with a language, tradition and history all its own. A Spaniard has no reason at all to sit around and lament the passing of Spain's empire and the fact that it no longer has an armada. A Spaniard has no compelling reason to give up being a Spaniard and emigrate to a bigger, more powerful nation. A Spaniard can certainly live and build a perfectly satisfying and meaningful life within the borders of Spain, where there are things you can learn, say and do that you can't do as well anyplace else.

The second metaphor, which I've lifted from Dave Hickey, is jazz, probably the greatest art form of the 20th century. (Some people might say the cinema is greater, but movies are a mechanical innovation and not a style or an outlook or a whole state of mind, which jazz is). At one time--roughly between Louis Armstrong's great recordings of the 1920s and the big band Swing high point in the late 1930s--jazz ruled the charts. Now, except for the occasional soundtrack album, it lies toward the bottom of the charts. But in its own way, and at is own level, it's healthy. It has a loyal and enthusiastic audience; it thrives in small clubs and through CDs that sell in the tens of thousands instead of the millions; and, for those who follow it, jazz continues to be innovative and wonderfully open to incorporating riffs and rhythms from other musical forms.

So, you're thinking, an abstract painter is a Spanish jazz musician as opposed to an installation or video artist, who's an American pop star? Well, the metaphor is a bit strained at this point, but it's not wholly inappropriate.

Of course, the main thing that keeps me a painter is habit. I've been--at least nominally--a professional painter for forty-one years, and I'm not likely to change. It's what I do, and I do it well enough from both an inward perspective (I still find it satisfying and profound) and an outward one (I've had just enough art-world success with it to satisfy my artist's ego) to make me keep going with it. I don't pretend that I do it because I've taken a long, hard, objective look at all the various art forms available to me and rationally chosen painting. Even if I could have done that, it would strike me as somehow beside the point and passionless, like taking a long, hard objective look at all the various religions available to me and rationally choosing a particular faith.

This is what keeps me a painter, but how did I get to be one? Here's the mercifully condensed version of the story. My father had some drawing talent, took some night classes at the Cleveland Art Institute in the late 1920s, and wanted to be an illustrator. But the vicissitudes of the Great Depression in the 1930s and getting married wouldn't allow him to live the precarious freelance life, so he became a jack-of-all-trades guy at a succession of small, barely viable advertising agencies. He brought home all kinds of commercial art materials for me--chisel-tipped pencils, India ink, kneaded erasers, gouaches, watercolor brushes, illustration board and my favorite thing, one of those Lazy Susans that commercial artists have by their drafting tables.

In high school, I wanted to be an magazine illustrator along the lines of Robert Fawcett or Austin Briggs. And, like my father, I had some drawing talent--enough, at least, so that I did the cartoons for the high school yearbook and, at USC, spent four years as the weekly political cartoonist for The Daily Trojan. (When I look back at those DT cartoons today, the content is cliched, mawkish and awful, but the drawing still isn't too bad.) When I went off to college--a combination of scholarships made USC feasible for this lower-middle-class kid--I became a nominal English major because that, at least in my day, was what you called yourself while you were making up your mind.

Two art classes turned me into an art major. One was called "Fundamentals of Drawing and Painting," taught by Edgar Ewing. In it, I found, as they say in the athletic department, that I could compete on the college level. I also found out that I liked to paint, even--as in one assignment--with egg tempera on a small square of masonite. The other class was art appreciation--although it was called something more important-sounding--taught by Delmore Scott. At the beginning of the course, which I took as a 17-year-old freshman, we were asked to write down our two or three favorite artists. I put down Austin Briggs, the illustrator, and Saul Bass, the graphic designer who famously did the movie titles and posters for the likes of The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder and Exodus. That must have taken Scottie--who was probably used to students writing down Monet or Norman Rockwell--by surprise. By the end of the course, I would have put down Mondrian and let it go at that.

Gradually, I came to specialize in painting, although my degree, as did all majors', simply reads "Fine Arts." I studied further with Ewing, who taught me the more traditional methods of composition and paint-handling, Keith Crown, who taught me about color and having a sense of humor about the whole enterprise, and James Jarvaise, USC's star graduate of the mid-1950s who was included in the famous Dorothy-Miller-curated "Twelve Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 that also introduced Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella to the general public. What did Jarvaise teach me? Well, one night in a deserted classroom, I was painting a romantically prettified portrait of a woman with whom I'd fallen in love and whom I'd importuned to pose for me--fully clothed, of course. Jarvaise came into the classroom through one door, walked across the room, said in passing, "Oh, come on, Plagens!," and walked out the other door. He taught me that painting is not illustration, nor should it be a means to some kind of extra-artistic end, such as impressing your girlfriend.

Inevitably, though, one's art--in this case, my painting--does have an at least partial extra-artistic end. Aristophanes, in the ancient comedy The Clouds, says that what all artists want is applause. In New York, they say that all artists want three things: sex, money, and a bigger studio. We artists are not, as I said in the beginning of this talk, celibate monks in a grotto. Having an extra-artistic end, such as getting famous or selling a lot, has, however, its own extra-artistic end: getting some vaguely objective idea of whether your art is any good or not.

If you're not a publicly ambitious artist, if you just hole up in your studio and show your art to just a few friends and loved ones or don't show it to anybody at all, there's a great danger that you'll end up, as my dear longtime painter-friend Walter Gabrielson says, swallowing your own soothing syrup. That is, you'll be a prisoner of your own delusions. The reason why that's a bigger danger to an abstract painter than to, say, a novelist, is that the history of modern art contains a very powerful operative myth--not totally untrue--about the great artist who has no audience, let alone a clientele, until long after he or she is dead. In fact, the myth sometimes goes as far as saying in effect that the artist is great precisely because he or she had no audience or clientele while alive. A lot of artists I know think--subconsciously, somewhere in the backs of their heads--that if the history of modern art were interpreted just one degree differently from the prevailing canon, they'd end up near the top of the list of great artists.

On the other hand, I don't mean to say that fame or sales is a direct and accurate index of how good or important a given artist is. If that's the case, the best painters going are Leroy Neiman, Thomas Kinkade and Peter Max. All I'm saying is that trying to get famous as a painter and sell a lot of work of necessity puts you out there "in the shit" and gives you some unsentimental feedback about your art from people who aren't prejudiced by what a wonderful, loveable person you are.

Which brings me back to the matter of having an audience. When I started out as a painter 1964, the art world was in the last throes of believing in bohemianism--the idea that real artists holed themselves up in their studios and made art that was so weird, shocking, arcane, intellectual or just plain ahead of its time that it wouldn't be understood, let alone appreciated and sold, until years, maybe decades, had passed. The last throes of bohemianism turned into an academy--"an academy for rebels against the academy," I used to tell graduate students to get them to think about the paradox of their situation.

Suddenly, we had an audience larger than our circle of other artists and friends. It wasn't a client-audience because we graduates of the academy who went back into the academy--yes, I was a college art professor for twenty-plus years--weren't making our livings by selling art. We were making our livings by getting tenure, promotions to associate and full professor, and pay raises. Our audience, therefore, were the people who sat on our tenure and promotion committees and, indirectly, the people who gave us shows at nonprofit institutional spaces, invited us to give lectures and sit on symposia, and had us in as visiting artists. Our audience was, in effect, anybody who could provide us with a line on our resumes that would impress the people who sat on our tenure and promotion committees.

Now, what usually offends artists lodged in the academy--and again, I was one of them for most of my career, so I include myself among them--is any idea that the de facto audience lurking out there had any effect on the art we made. Of course it did. What artist ever, throughout history, hasn't made art to please his or her de facto patron, whether that patron be the Egyptian pharaoh, the Medieval king or Renaissance prince, the Enlightenment aristocracy, the wealthy Dutch merchant, the official French Salon, the American robber baron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Robert Scull, Dean Valentine or the director of the alternative space who invites the artist in to do a "piece" accompanied by a small brochure? The answer: none that we know of.

But even if we nominally independent artists really do, at some semi subconscious level, cater to our de facto patrons, the idea of an audience for us is still indirect and hazy. A few friends and fellow artists see our exhibitions and tell us what they think, albeit in guarded terms. (Every artist knows that when someone tells him or her that the work is "interesting," it means it sucks.) Or the show gets reviewed in an art magazine, often by someone we know; the review is usually just a couple of paragraphs long and, in my experience, ends with a couple of sentences that, with a few details changed, could be used in any other review of any other exhibition and more or less fit. Those sentences say, in effect, that the work is generally nice, that it has possibilities for further development, and that only time will tell. And that's the extent of it. No line of ticket holders to the show stretching around the block, no fan clubs and their websites, no bestseller lists and Top 40 charts, no letters to the editor from a fan disputing a negative review. In short, no body of interested viewers large enough to facilitate meaningful tracking of how the artist's work is faring with the public.

My son Paul is a rock musician, a singer-songwriter who had a band that had a couple of albums on Mercury back in the early 1990s. After some troubles with life in the fast lane, he now lives more quietly in Olympia, Washington, where he performs in restaurants and small clubs and is starting to work on recording again. When he talks to me about playing a gig, I'm always struck by the direct, immediate and consequential relationship he has with an audience. They liked the show a lot and asked for more. They didn't like it and filed out sullenly. They asked if they could by CDs of the set. Hardly anybody showed up. They want him to do more songs from his old band, Greta, or they want more Beatles covers, etc. The point is that he lives with a real audience and, within limits, caters to it. So do novelists, so do actors, so do screenwriters, so do concertmasters. But with artists--even artists whose work is alleged to have some reformative socio-political ambitions--catering to an audience is considered, when you boil it down, a kind of whoring.

Back when I taught at Cal State, Northridge, in the 1970s, I had an "advanced painting workshop" at night in which the students worked on projects of their own devising and subjected them to three or four big crits during the semester. There was one Mexican-American guy who did competently drawn and neatly colored, but woefully cliched and superhero-comiclike derivations on Diego Rivera's political murals. When I'd tell him that, good intentions aside, his paintings were cliched and adolescent, he'd reply that since I wasn't part of La Raza, I simply didn't understand his work and wasn't qualified to criticize it. Only other members of MECHA, a campus political group, were qualified. Similarly, a female student who did Dorthea Tanning-knockoff watercolors filled with strange figures from her past would tell me when I criticized the work for being hermetic and flaccid that her pictures were strictly "personal." (I asked her if they were so personal, why did she insist on making them public? She just sniffed, and walked away.)

Frustrated by this sort of thing (remember, this was the '70s, and nobody was thinking about trying to get Dean Valentine to buy their entire thesis show so photographs of them at hot parties could be posted on artnet.com), the next semester I drew up a contract for every student to fill out and sign at the beginning of the semester. It specified not only how many works of what size and medium were to be produced, but asked toward what audience the work was directed--the general public, the larger art audience that goes to LACMA and reads the L.A. Times's "Calendar" section assiduously, hardcore contemporary gallery-goers, a few influential critics, artist-friends, personal friends, or some special-interest group concerned with an extra-artistic agenda? You'd have thought I'd asked about their darkest family secrets. There was a big revolt, a lot of complaints, and I never did it again.

But one of the things that's changed a lot recently is that much younger artists are now more openly catering to an audience. On the whole, this isn't necessarily such a bad thing. The great art historian--possibly the greatest art historian--E.H. Gombrich says in so many words in his indispensable book The Story of Art, that Western art started to go downhill when artists started working on spec (i.e., making work first and trying to sell it later), instead of on commission for some prince. Gombrich says that things got worse when artists began to leave the audience out of the equation intentionally. (Note: Gombrich wasn't an anti-modernist philistine; even in his 90s, he went 'round to gallery shows in London and knew full well who Damien Hirst is. He was talking the big picture, the larger arc, from, say Giotto's commissioned Arena Chapel frescoes to, say, a Brice Marden abstraction done on spec.)

Now, awareness of the audience is back. Younger artists more openly acknowledge that--at least in part--they're trying to deliver what some audience that they have in mind wants. Of course, they're trying to express themselves, further a political cause, or advance a theory about art, too, but the idea of packaging any or all of that in a form that's attractive to a certain audience isn't the cause for outraged denial that it once was. At least that's what I perceive to be the case in New York and, in spades, in southern California. Me, I regard this as a sign of mental health among younger artists. They know that the NEA, scads of teaching jobs, residencies and fellowships are no longer available to support work that's as hermetic and arcane as a lot of art got in the 1970s, and they're adjusting to the situation.

To be perfectly honest with you, this exhibition of mine now, in 2004 and 2005, is the first time since I started painting that I've ever had a reasonably rational feeling of having an audience. For forty years, I've existed in that art-world feedback loop that I've always just assumed--yes, without thinking too much about it--was the price of what I considered my artistic integrity, i.e., the price I paind for painting paintings exactly the way I wanted them to be. In the beginning, my work looked enough like reproductions of stuff in Artforum for the dean at wherever I was teaching to think that I was enough of a prospect to lend some cachet to the fine arts department. In the middle years, my work looked enough like what my friends and colleagues were doing, too, for them to think that they should show up at the opening of my shows and smoke and drink white wine out of plastic cups and nod, "Yeah, it's OK." And at one New York exhibition about ten years ago, David Gates, a novelist and book critic colleague at Newsweek who has general disdain for contemporary art because he thinks it's all way too pretentious, said to me, "You know, this isn't bad. I was really afraid I was going to walk in the door and it would be a lotta crap."

Of course artist-friends, art-world friends, art academics and a few writers I know turned up at this show's opening in L.A. But so did, over the first few weeks, a portion of the general public. People (I've been told) have argued whether Dave Hickey's essay accurately describes the art and the artist or not. And the show got a huge, extremely favorable review in the L.A. Times, which changed everything.

Now, the last thing either a real bigtime painter like, say, Brice Marden, or a very ambitious 28-year-old tyro installation artist is going to do is admit publicly that a single review can have such a large effect. It would imply that the artist and his or her work is at the mercy of the critic, and no self-respecting artist would want to do that. But I've been on the other end of that equation for almost as long as I've been a painter, and I know what goes into criticism. It's hard to come to a cogent, justifiable point of view about an artist's exhibition, it's hard to write that view clearly, it's hard to get a non-art-world editor to see that you've written it clearly by his or her standards, and it's hard to feel comfortable with what you've written once it gets into print. So, if somebody writes a really negative review of my work, I won't be able to just tell myself that I'm a prophet without honor in my own land, or too profound for mere art journalists. I'll be bummed out for a long while. But if somebody writes something nice, I'll be elated.

I'm also more sensitive to criticism, perhaps, than most artists, because I think--no, I know--that there's a tendency for the knives to come out when somebody who's better known as a critic (which I accept; I didn't have to take the Newsweek job when it was offered) has the audacity to put his own stuff up in a gallery or museum. I know I would finger the blade in the same situation. In fact, I have, in a review in Artforum of the work of an abstract painter named Darby Bannard--a Clement Greeberg devotee who also wrote prescriptive essays about what painting should be like--back in the 1970s. The first knife-edged question is, "Does the critic-artist (or artist-critic) live up to his own published standards?" "Can he take it as well as he gives it out?" is the second. I don't know the answer to the first question; that's for somebody else to say. The answer to the second is no, I can't.

Anyway, David Pagel's L.A. Times review was first and foremost for me, a tremendous relief simply because I wasn't beaten over the head with my own criticism. The second thing was that it made Selma Holo and her staff at the Fisher Gallery at USC feel justified, feel that they hadn't merely done a favor for a hometown boy and USC alumnus, feel that they hadn't put themselves out on a limb for somebody whose main reputation is as an art critic, somebody who might not deserve the retrospective treatment, and had the limb sawed off. Practically speaking, Selma Holo looked good to the provost who looked good the president who looked good to the board of trustees. (Truth be told, the president, who's raised a couple of billion dollars for the university over a dozen or so years and is about to retire, didn't need me or my exhibition.) And the third thing is that the review enabled me to think, "OK, apparently I haven't been completely full of shit for thirty years, so at least I can go back into the studio and just take it from there, wherever my big bulbous nose takes me and not worry so much about my initial premises."

What, you're thinking, the guy's been painting for forty years, has a show that covers--kind of--thirty years of 'em, and he still has doubts about initial premises? Yes, I do. That's the thrilling but sometimes depressing peculiarity about abstract painting--at least the kind that I do. After 90 or so years, abstract painting no longer has any street cred as being radical, tough, or daring. Unlike the realism of, say, William Beckmann or Jenny Saville, it doesn't demonstrate any indisputable facility. And unless you buy into the existentialist program of the artist confronting the nothingness of the blank canvas and trying to make something out of it without getting any points for being radical and without demonstrating any unquestioned facility (or "talent," if you like), it seems self-indulgent, maybe even pointless.

But there's a certain freedom in all this that's exhilarating, especially for an artist in his later years. My son, who like a lot of rock musicians has been in rehab, says that another guy in the same rehab said he'd finally given up any hope of having a better past. Well, likewise for a 64-year-old painter who's past the stage where, in some dark corner of his mind, he's always curating his retrospective, always just a little teensy bit trying to make what he's painting now somehow fit an overall self-conception of what the whole body of work--the oov-ruh--grandly means. As of this exhibition, that's out of my hands and, more important, out of my head.

And with all that out of my head, I can think totally about other things when I paint. Here's what I wrote in an entry in my journal a few weeks ago:

"When I'm painting, especially in the beginning or mid-beginning, I notice a lot of nice goodies--those shape/paint-application/raw-canvas/drawing amoeba that I like. Sometimes I wonder why the hell I don't create and preserve more of them in the finished painting; sure would look a lot zippier, I realize. But I want to maintain the relative (not absolute) singularity of things within a picture to let it have (not give it) more meaning. It's a choice, more often than not, of sacrificing some degree of fresh good-lookingness for at least a reasonable suspicion of profoundity beyond the esthetic. More goodies, better looks, but less possible profundity; fewer goodies, ugly or inept-looking, but a shot a meaning something beyond esthetics (but not a meaning easily stateable in words, or maybe not in stateable in words at all). If I've got any gravitas as an artist, I'll choose the latter. Doesn't mean I succeed (as when Laurie thinks I should have thought something she said funny because 'it was a joke,' and I reply, 'as with free throws, a joke attempted is not necessarily a joke made'). But at least I give it a shot."

Thank you.