Thomas Nozkowski
Pace Gallery, NY
Like I said, I’m not in love with Kelley or Rothko’s work, but I’m happy to be their ardent advocate. Being in love with an artist’s project is so personal that it’s out of our control. I’m out-of-control in love with Tom Nozkowski’s pictures. The show of older work at Pace has deepened the emotion.
Some enterprising school should build an online catalogue raisonnée of his corpus, and make it freely accessible, like Duke did for William Gedney. Another of my artistic crushes, Gedney’s photographs, like Nozkowski’s paintings, are erotic in the sense that Susan Sontag meant, I think, in the last line of Against Interpretation: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Like beauty, though, eros is a beholder’s affair. For my money, Gedney’s most erotic photos are the houses he shot at night, rather than his Indian wrestlers or barefoot hillbillies.
My father praised Playboy and sneered at Hustler because he believed it more erotic to leave something to the imagination. I’m not precisely my father’s son, so dark houses photographed at night and sensuous abstract paintings that only make sense to the painter, stimulate my eros. A comprehensive JPEG inventory of Nozkowski’s paintings would not only make my point about his consistent erotic power, but might seduce a legion of new lovers as well.
Transcendent sensuality is a consolation, which is what I think Schopenhauer may also have been getting at when he said that the arts were a consolation for life’s ineluctable suffering. Sensual consolation overshadows whatever consoling meaning art may be attempting to convey. Sure, it’s in the business of manufacturing meaning, but it does so by manipulating our primate eyes, along with their diplomatic access to the other senses. Compare this to McLuhan’s heavily repeated slogan about the medium being the message that attracted Sontag’s disapproval. If you shift the language to the analogous ‘sensuality is sense,’ which is all you can expect from painted souvenirs of encrypted experience, perhaps Sontag might have warmed to McLuhan’s perspective. I imagine them burying the hatchet while visiting this show together.
His online catalogue raisonnée would be more about painting than about Thomas Nozkowski. Even if the work is more concerned than usual with a unique life’s experience, he is so hermetic a presence in it that you can only be indirectly aware of him. Nozkowski turned abstraction into a fig leaf to shield our eyes from the examined life that the work records. His modesty draws our attention away from the concealed ‘what’ of his paintings toward the explicit ‘how’ of paint. Through abstraction, he transforms the details of his inscrutable subjects into a surface of independent sensations, resulting in pedagogically rich information about what paint can do.
Any artist’s work has a biographical dimension, even the uber-reductivists Roman Opalka and On Kawara were making art about themselves, not as self-expression—“What’s that?” ask the Buddhists—but as self-measurement. Through his dissembling method, Nozkowski may have been trying to measure and express himself, but only to himself, incidentally expressing and measuring paint, its properties, its effects, its phenomenal characteristics. His fig leaf out-smarts utopian high modernism’s denial of self in the name of universality by exploiting the private sensations that can lead to good modern paintings.
Nozkowski takes the lover’s approach with the medium: his fastidious sensuality explores its physics as he struggles to reach the nirvana of consummated existence. This causes a friction that I find erotic in Sontag’s sublimated sense. Trained by disengaged formalists, but avid to return art to the service of the world, Nozkowski rubs two incompatible sensibilities together. Through that friction, you might get a glimpse of painting’s fundamental binary: the process that results in an autonomous object, and the medium that results in a meaningful picture. Neither autonomous nor meaningful in his unconventional hands, the binary is revealed through mutual neutralisation.
There was a moment back in the early 1980s when a few American artists were isolating single subjects or subject groups against a uniform colour. Sarah Charlesworth was one; Nicolas Africano was another. A shotgun marriage of the monochrome and the figure, they remind me of domestic Roman frescoes. I thought of these artists as I moved among similar works by Nozkowski that predate them, abstract things in isolation.
Sontag’s request that we should feel more and interpret less came to mind while reconsidering the show. Was Nozkowski addressing her with these single motifs? As aficionados go, his interests were broad and deep and his library was big, so I would be surprised if he hadn’t read Against Interpretation, or if Charlesworth and Africano had not. The book with the title essay hasn’t gone out-of-print since it appeared in 1966.
“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all,” she wrote. Sontag meant the task of the viewer, but artists also took her up and made work that might short-circuit the viewer’s instinct to find the content, pictures simple enough to pre-empt, or at least circumscribe interpretation. Analysis, another beholder’s prerogative, is built-in with us, though. It’s likely a survival reflex. Like all creatures with eyes, we automatically scan the field for dangers and desires that we interpret at lightning speed. Is looking at art not the same?
Nozkowski came closest, I think, to addressing Sontag’s frustration with our rush to read and over read, not by shutting down the process like a monochrome painter, but by giving us something at once detailed and unaccountable to look at. Even when he presents a single subject against a blank background, as he did in the second half of the 70s, it’s as if he were daring us to name it, to explain it. Rigorous, his abstraction is a public-facing privacy that carved out a unique place for itself in art, but the work was not impervious to the current of ideas.
I was expecting to see a nostalgic show of rustic work by a younger painter not yet in full possession of his skills. Instead, I saw an already skilful painter struggling to emerge from the sleep of process into the wakefulness of purpose. So when exactly was Nozkowski’s work not much to look at?
Thanks Marc for championing Nozkowski. I discovered his work at the National Gallery show you curated.
"Struggling to emerge from the sleep of process into the wakefulness of purpose." That's a lovely way to put it. You were alluding to Schopenhauer earlier. Thanks again.