I wrote the following after seeing Karma show
Journals October 15–November 15, 2015. Karma Gallery Great Jones St
Brice Marden Karma
Karma has had many of the best recent shows in New York.
There is a hip intimacy somewhat like the old days in NY.
I thought great! Brice Marden.
I remembered well the Suicide Notes, notebooks similar to these being shown and a big grey painting, I had one called, Dylan in mind— should be great.
I was so deflated to walk in.
The new crowd— no one I knew— two of my friends in the back talking—watching Brice from a distance. A vitrine looking more like Tiffany’s preciousness, than Karma’s usual cool design.
Pretty thirty year olds walking around in their hi-heels— maybe like their mothers from suburbia.
Boy, not what I remembered feeling about this all.
What I remember is like it was yesterday Brice sitting alone at the Locale— Micky Ruskin’s bar after Max’s decline. Brice having dinner alone early before the crowd would descend. I see his handsome long hair and Nocona cowboy boots.
I knew him from the de Menil crowd, Christophe had the Grove Group up at her house. He was the darling, worked for Rauchenberg and knew Jasper Johns. The grey he produced had a pedigree and rigor of seriousness.
The Fra Angelica print, she also had, with Brice’s black square juxtaposed made sense, there was a real gravity in the best work.
The figurative line with the monochrome surface always stuck in my mind physically.
I made many things like that but he was so big and impossible to get around.
So as I was thinking of my disappointment with the show I realized it was me—. I was expecting some stylish move and here was the old gravity. One doesn’t even recognize it any more, that now almost realist idea.
This was the older on going thread from Abstract Expressionism. The negative capability becoming a positive or even beyond to a synthesis beyond duality.
I was struck at how sincere and authentic they seem. Today subconciously we know more, that we dont know— that reality is always changing.
So to see Brice somewhat stuck in that intellectuality of another time, one can poke fun. Brice’s work always had a restraint which was impossible for me to contain in my own.
I was from an even wilder strain of Romantic.
I guess I see now Pollock was behind him here in these drawings of gridded romance maybe more Mondrian— but there is the space of dreaming into a notebook.
I always saw Brice’s process as backwards. The classic cool knowing monochrome surface of these earlier paintings should be what he makes now. Having figured it all out from the gridded drawings maybe the brushstrokes of the making working up to monochrome surface. Maybe that was all to obvious.
I took out after him at times always beaten back to my own meanderings in my own abstract expressionist search for understanding of some kind.
I went to California and spent a considerable time talking into many a night with John McCracken and his friend David Trowbridge. Brice was often the subject of the conversation.
McCracken had also been able to contain in his work a relation to all the rest of art.
I made what I called Shields, at that time. They went into space and came back to a surface. I drew a lot and my energy went more to the subject and it’s constant content leanings.
I guess why Marden is compelling for me to write about is because I was always playing off his paintings. What we miss now is one, who as the older guys like de Kooning said, “was the one to beat.”
When I came back to NY in 1984 I saw that Brice was drawing now also. Japanese calligraphy was supplying him with a what I call Romantic form for his new phase or search.
I was making leaves in 1988 and saw poetry and leaves as similar and we had a coincidence almost but only momentary. My figurative reality came roaring back in 1989.
I was intimate through the Shields and from my Black and white paint of the 80’s of the monochrome and of the romantic Pollock like space from which the classic surface was sought.
I wanted to up the ante with what I saw as the romantic and classic realities creating a third, the always changing figurative reality of our time.
Alex Katz had been one of Brice’s teachers at Yale and I saw also a connection to Brice’s webs from the Japanese in Nature.
The over all webs also related to Pollock and now it seemed maybe towards a naturalistic reality connected to the Japanese—(romantic).
Every once in a while I was struck by a closeness to nature.
The culture was shifting and would give us all , each in his turn, a run for it—.
Brice as the top was the one who held the keys to the reining cultural reality. We all knew finally there was none like Truth— although Brice was close to God! Especially as his Modern retrospective ended a moment’s time.
I joke but this has been the reality.
We see Rembrandt or Picasso or the Solomon Christ as a dictating reality.
So one tries to unseat this way of seeing.
Christopher Wool took a spray can and wiped it away, exposing a remaining drawing fragment of which mysteriously contained what Brice may have been searching for— close to what we all looked for.
Its off handedness pointed to how over serious it all had become. At least for our time.
As this painting of Brice’s was now just one— in a line of many differing realities seen now side by side, as maybe getting to the point or Truth. David Salle could graft it as an appropriation added to the other styles he collected. And Katz was saying it was all-- style.
I dont think Brice will ever try the actual figuration of a tree, say— as Christopher has made a stab recently from the Guston trench. Brice's Muses are even too close for me-- that seems another difficult path to explore.
But I have here figured out a little clearer as to what has been going on— the Truth we continue to expose even at the reality of none.
Date:
1991–94/1997–99
Artist:
Brice Marden
American, 1938-2023
Brice died this month August 2023. His last show of Monet like grandeur and sutra paintings combined in a surprising reverence and poem to natural form. He adds another level to the Modernist project.
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