When synesthesia was first
used to herald the entrance into abstract art, suddenly and peculiarly,
the word became the subject of its own anathema. Let's say that
Kandinsky did it. He pronounced a curse upon language; he, who was
well trained in penal logic, and as an artist guided his hand along
the contours of visual correspondence to create paintings which,
in relation to the accepted canon of imagery, looked like many things
and nothing at the same time. Hence, his somewhat hysterical response
to his creation: we should consider if his eye was overwhelmed by
the images it saw, that his paintings literally spoke to him through
these images, as if through an icon, and that he invoked music in
order to drive away the pain inflicted by the piercing phonetics
of their words, which most likely had themselves many things at
once and yet nothing at all left to signify. Music and words on
the inside, words being forced out; the body self-contained in the
harmony of sight and internal, wordless sound; words infiltrating
the body through the mind and blocking there the false accord between
one sense based on perception, sight, and another transported by
imagination, hearing. Hearing sounds in response to color and form
is a sign of a synesthetic experience, and one of the blessed fruits
of high modernist culture hearing words, on the other hand, is a
harbinger of the schizophrenic.
Anton Henning's paintings appeal to schizo-experience and schizo-culture.
(Before moving on quickly from that proposition, three questions
necessarily arise out of it, each one separately from the other
two: is there a little schizophrenic in each of us whose interest
is being aroused by his art? does the artist make an urgent request
that we understand the schizophrenic, at the least in a theoretic
sense? schizophrenia, is that some kind of higher authority?) What
keeps an individual separate from collective experience here is
akin to the subtle difference between illogic and a passion for
guilt by association on one side, and anti-logic and the freedom
from reason implicit in association on the other. Together these
two sides oppose a third, a culturally determined schizo-experience,
which is neither an individual nor a collective one. Like an absent
book, its meaning cannot be read directly, but though it stands
tangential to his work- problematical meaning, painful meaning-its
meaning can be described, by referring to Henning's paintings, as
a system of aesthetic morality, like synesthesia, that obscures
precisely the meaning of language in the medium of language. We
will come back to this.
Fundamental to any appreciation of Henning's artwork in a cultural
context is first to recognize that it itself is a culture; a smaller
culture built upon still smaller ones; a biologic culture in which
images are grown inside paint and paper; a culture of lineage; and
a schizophrenic culture, in that its images function phonetically
through the medium of words that have detached from their significations.
If we look at the work, a single example of how he projects an image
from out of its abstract state and into others, for example, organic
and figural, will serve to illustrate this metaphor for culture:
at first, a simple triangle; then it appears as a floral blossom,
and at the same time, feminine genitalia; then, most definitely,
it represents a mons veneris replete with public hair, but in the
same vicinity it takes the form of a cow's udder, dangling breasts,
a spray of milk or pure light, a dusty road that sharply recedes
to a single point and vanishes; and to complicate matters, the style
and media in which these permutations of the image are rendered
changes-usually gestural in style and schematic in form, he uses
an all out scribble to great effect, gauzy photographs, ink splotches,
finger painting and collage, intermittently. It is as if the ramified
substance of cultural representation were being articulated in the
guise of visually corresponding taxa. More specifically, what we
have here Barbara Kruger may have said it best, "We won't play nature
to your culture"- is the automatic, and thereby ideologic, deep
association of the feminine with nature, which has been, of course,
a stalwart subject of patronymic art and literature for centuries
at least. What makes Henning's art different and important is that
it reveals, in part, how such cultural representations are constructed,
and how, in turn, from the viewer's or critic's perspective, they
might be dissected using language-its shizophrenic aspect. But before
we do that, let us consider just one more imagic example: cell,
egg, eye, testicle, breast-areola-nipple, big nipple, glans penis,
ball, pearl, atom, axondendrite ... head.
Some people find it helpful comparing Henning's work to jazz-fusion
music, in order to more readily grasp its syncopated, recapitulating
formal qualities. This is a desperate act, and one that purposely
or inadvertently glosses over deeper issues of which form plays
only a outlying role, for already the act of seeing signifies the
real absence of music, or sound. Instead, sounds are seen. Images
are spoken: recounting to oneself what one sees and constructing
with it a narrative that fits Henning's imagery, recapitulated or
otherwise, into a coherent whole, raises a more substantial and
difficult issue about representation. Tending to coalesce visually
as a result of their formal affinities, the images in his paintings
simply do not hang together on this linguistic level unless subjectively
motivated to do so. Women are not akin to cows, and the feminine
is no more and no less natural than the masculine, except, for example,
insofar as it has been used historically as the raw material and
site for the erection of male fantasies. No act is unmotivated his
work tells us, although many appear to be. Likewise, the appearance
of (visual) continuity seduces the viewer into attempting narrative
reconciliation in the same way, which holds only tragic implications,
because words correspond (in a manner like visual correspondence)
through their sounds, which are absent here, and not through their
meanings, which are always present, freely floating, and produced
by difference rather than similitude. (Meanings agree in ideologies.)
If one tries to construct a meaningful paradigm for these images
in words which lacks motivation, that is to say, an amoral, objective,
or continuous paradigm, then, like the images themselves-cut up,
severed and detached bodies, heaving expressions, all divisions
permeable, screen memories-breakdown must certainly ensue on the
levels of language and the self both, simultaneously. Words split
from their significations: they are words as such no longer, but
guttural, screaming, monotone, cackling phonetics; they descend
from the head, where meaning is kept, into the intestines and limbs
where they are inscribed as corporal commands in the pages of a
hidden, and thus absent, book. At this level of depth, the depth
which Anton Henning's paintings express, words affect the body directly
and the body responds automatically. Every word carries this power,
too.
Alan J. Hanson October, 1991
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