1.
We shared a building that we used as studios. I never saw much of him at first, his tall thin figure slipping outside to his Toyota pick up, then later the door creaking shut as he came back. The exhaust fan he used to rid the studio of fumes and dust would come on and
Whir into the night.
I’d see him out at the Mexican restaurant, always apparently lost in thought. Hey-- he would say haltingly, then immediately give himself over, in the most gracious of ways.
Well, let’s talk about Art!
The painter David Trowbridge would often be over at his studio, we three would get together and talk late into the evening. Others dropped by. John might be just finishing a piece, and carefully with rubber gloves, so as not to scratch the
RED, newly polished surface,
would bring it out
into the studio light.
We stared for hours and brainstormed different associations the piece made in reference
to the color, shape--
our own bodies,
to the spaces surrounding
It seemed a single thing. At that moment it was Art itself. It stood outside of every description, it was self referential. It seemed
to have appeared from nowhere--
The figures of the apes, in 2001, were us, as we probed the seemingly smug object, giving up nothing then multitudes in reflection and
then slipping to nothing
from another angle
seemingly to disappear--
What secrets would the tall Black shape tell us?
The object stood by--
Like a Newman Zip rendered sculptural, a sculpture of the transcendental signified, the beyondness of everything, then the reality of being--
right here, again
some finality was here.
Our conversation usually turned back to painting, to Pollock or Toby, John’s own paintings a sizzle of mental circuitry. From this space of painting we then were flung back to the sharp reality of the present object before us,
always the critical
Greenbergian thingness--
the surface, flat--
here, here--
the Cezanne like touch
here, here.
2.
Years later in New Mexico, I helped John make some of his pieces. I realized the constant touching, the constant making of the Surface, in the actual building of--
the scored lines for nails--
driven,
securing that surface,
then the glass, the cloth,
clothing the reclined body
the flooding of that smooth surface, the pure Blue--
resin reaching level
each side poured and hardening. Now beginning the sanding into this surface, cutting into the physical color,
the disc roughing it, sketching
the final shape and
perfected edge,
each step sanding out, those preceding marks, into finer and finer marks to the continued
swishing of the orbital sander--
stage after stage,
Until the only way to see the slightest scratch, was in learning to distinguish surface from reflection.
Here maybe is a glimpse of the composite that makes McCracken.
That thingness, tied to a
inner depth reflecting back.
This depth challenged the finality of the “grey minimal box,” heightening it to one of possibility. This OPTIMISM was a reaching, or
glimpse to future hope,
asserting itself, here
in this reduction
to a single thing,
refering to nothing, yet
to everything else there is.
Gregory Botts, Abiquiu, NM, 2 May 1999.
